Changes

|But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

|But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

|When John saw how many Pharisees and Sadducees came to be baptized by him, he said to them, "You jerks! Who has warned you to flee from the ''divine'' sentence that's coming ''to you''?

|When John saw how many Pharisees and Sadducees came to be baptized by him, he said to them, "You jerks! Who has warned you to flee from the ''divine'' sentence that's coming ''to you''?

|The phrase '''Γεννηματα εχιδνων''', "sons of snakes," is an insult, akin to "sons of (female dogs)" or "bastards" or simply "jerks."

|The phrase '''Γεννηματα εχιδνων''', "sons of snakes," is an insult, akin to "sons of (female dogs)" or "bastards" or simply "jerks."  However, the etymology of "jerk" is generally understood to originate from American carnival slang, perhaps from jerkwater town (1878), where a steam locomotive crew had to take on boiler water from a trough or a creek because there was no water tank. This led 1890s to an adjective use of jerk as "inferior, insignificant." Presently, it is used to describe a person, a noun, and is a shortened aspect of the verb jerk off, slang for "perform male self love" (first recorded 1916). Jerk off (n.) as an emphatic form of jerk (n.) first attested 1968. Therefore it is improbable that Biblical personages would have used the word "Jerk."  The conservative use of the word "jerk" does not have to follow the liberal, socialist American slang definitions of the word "jerk" and therefore since it is in common use today and does not mean what it used to mean, but it can indeed mean what we want it to mean, we will use the word "jerk" instead of "generation of vipers."

The word rendered "wrath" is '''οργη''', which refers to the attitude of a magistrate before whom a convict appears for sentencing. In this context, they are clearly attempting to flee from God's justice by baptism. John finds this richly ironic, because he knows that Pharisees and Sadducees would be united in their "citified" contempt of him, because he's a roughneck who doesn't "dress properly," and everyone in Jerusalem surely knows it.

The word rendered "wrath" is '''οργη''', which refers to the attitude of a magistrate before whom a convict appears for sentencing. In this context, they are clearly attempting to flee from God's justice by baptism. John finds this richly ironic, because he knows that Pharisees and Sadducees would be united in their "citified" contempt of him, because he's a roughneck who doesn't "dress properly," and everyone in Jerusalem surely knows it.