A “Lost” Book Foretold the Death of Jesus Christ?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to do something a little bit different. Last week, if you remember, I started looking at the question of the Bible. How do we know which books belong in the Bible? Why do Catholic Bibles have seven books, Protestant Bibles don’t? Is it the case that the Catholic Church added those seven books at the Council of Trent, or were those seven books already in the Bible and then were removed by the Protestant reformers? If you want to know the answer to that question, check out last week’s episode, Did the Catholic Church Add Seven books? Or Did the Protestants Remove Seven? You’ll find it, and I think you’ll find the answer pretty clear historically despite what many Protestants will tell you.

But I want to go in a different approach, and I want to say if you’ve never read these seven disputed books, the ones Protestants call the Apocrypha and Catholics called the Deuterocanon, you’re missing out on a spiritual wealth. And I don’t just mean here that there’s great human wisdom in there, although sure. I mean here that they appear to be written by divine inspiration. And how can we say that? Because they seem to be very clearly prophetic of Jesus Christ.

And there’s one place I want to go, in one particular book, to make this point. It’s in the Book of Wisdom. But to give a little bit of background to it, I guess I’d say it like this. Imagine reading an Old Testament book that tells you about the coming of a righteous man who will claim to be the son of God. And he will rebuke the Israelites, he’ll rebuke the Jewish people, for not living up to their own law. And in response, the ungodly among them will respond by trying to put him to a painful, shameful, cruel death as a way of testing his claim to be the son of God.

Now, if you were to hear about that, who would you envision? I think it would be pretty obvious that you would be reading about Jesus. And so, I think you’ll be happy to find out the Book of Wisdom tells just that story. Now, if you’ve never encountered the Book of Wisdom, let’s start with just a couple basic facts. What is the book of Wisdom, and when was it written? We might also say where was it written, because the where is actually the less disputed issue.

This book was almost certainly written by a Jewish author living in Alexandria, Egypt. Now, I don’t know how much you know about Egypt and Alexandria and Judaism during the first century and before. During the Roman Empire, the largest center of Jewish activity outside of Israel itself was in Egypt, in the city of Alexandria. So for instance, in the flight to Egypt, when the Holy Family goes there, there’s a pretty good chance they end up in Alexandria because there were a ton of Jewish people there.

And so, as a result, they have a whole unique kind of perspective because they’re cut off from the temple. If you remember the story of when the first temple is being destroyed, you’ve got this whole debate about, “Should we go into Egypt?” And so, there’s a long history of the Jewish people, or before that, the Israelites, in Egypt. So it is almost certainly written by an Alexandrian Jew under, we would say, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But of course, that’s the point we’re debating.

And when was it written? Well, back in the 1950s, Joseph Reider, in the introduction to his translation of the Book of Wisdom, looks at the scholarship and says basically there’s a wide range of dates that are presented and says, “Well, what are we going to make of that? Scholars don’t agree on exactly when it was written.” And he says, “Well, okay. Clearly, evidently, neither the language nor the context nor the purpose of the book so far as it reveals itself is of any appreciable assistance in determining its exact age.” In other words, you can’t point to one passage and say, “Aha, this must have been written in 85 or in the third century BC or in some other point.” There’s no obviously clear reference, there’s no obviously clear citation we can point to some other. The normal means of which we tell how well the book is don’t give us a lot of help here.

And this is true actually with a lot of different ancient books. If they have a sort of timeless quality, it’s harder to tell when they’re from. And you can imagine that. If you’ve got a book that mentions President Biden, okay, that gives you a real clear sense of when that book might have been written. If you’ve got a book that mentions the USRR, you know it couldn’t have been written before the Soviet Union comes into existence, right? And depending on the context, it might be written before the Soviet Union dissolves, or maybe of someone looking back, right? So you’re going to have a starting point and an endpoint you can get from internal references.

We don’t have that here in the Book of Wisdom, because it’s talking about divine wisdom. This is as true today as it was when it was written, and it was equally true a thousand years before it was written, and millennia. In other words, you can’t tell from the internal texts exactly when it was written.

And so, Reider goes on to say, “All we can say with a reasonable assurance is that the Book of Wisdom is later than Ben Sira, that’s the book of Sirach, which has been dated by scholars to maybe 180 BC, and the Ketuvim of the Prophets, and we’d say the Writings, the Hagiographa, because in Wisdom there are references to Sirach. There are references to the prophets and to the writings, and it’s clearly the Ketuvim that’s being quoted from. So we can give it a little bit of a starting point that, “Okay. It can’t be earlier than about 180 BC, and it seems to be earlier than the first-century Jewish philosopher, Philo.” How do we know that? Because Philo is doing a very similar kind of project, and there’s no hint that the author of Wisdom has read Philo, and Philo is big in Egypt.

And the New Testament books seemingly presupposes its existence. In other words, it’s much more plausible the New Testament and Philo are building off of Wisdom than the other way around. So that gives us a rough starting and end point somewhere between 180 BC and right before the dawn of Christianity. So, as he puts it, as Reider puts it, it’s sometime during the last pre-Christian century, so within a hundred years before the birth of Christ.

That’s the 1950s. You might say, “Well, has scholarship improved since then?” Not really. David DeSilva, who I believe is a Protestant author who believes Protestants need to rediscover the so-called Apocrypha, he argues there’s a wider debate concerning the date of Wisdom, which has been placed anywhere between 220 BC and 100 AD. So that’s actually worse than in Reider, that you’ve got people who will actually claim it’s later than the New Testament, which I think is a pretty implausible kind of estimate.

Nevertheless, he’s saying, “Okay, the earliest possibility, it can’t be earlier than 220. Why? Because the author quotes from the Greek translation of Isaiah, Job, and Proverbs, which were probably available by the year 200.” And he said, “The latest possible date is established by the evident use of the work by several New Testament authors,” that the book of Wisdom appears to be referenced in the New Testament, which is a big detail to just kind of throw out there, as a Protestant. And he says, “A date within the early period of Roman domination of Egypt, especially the early Roman Principate or Roman Empire, seems most likely.” So again, we’re looking at the period just a little bit before the time of Christ.

So you’ll remember Jesus says, “The Law and the Prophets testify until John.” There’s no hint anywhere in the Bible of 400 years of divine silence that many Protestants believe in today. That’s not an actual biblical idea. That’s just a popular myth that, strangely enough, originally comes from kind of anti-Christian polemics, the argument that all revelations ceased in 450 BC, and so therefore the New Testament can’t be true. Okay. And so, strangely, Protestants have picked up on that and reinterpreted to say, “Well, all prophecy stopped then and then it restarted.” None of that is biblical. I won’t get into all of that here. That’s not really the point. But the point is, this is what Protestants would call an Intertestamental book. It’s after the end of the Protestant Old Testament before the New Testament. And that’s a pretty important detail. This is someone writing before Jesus who isn’t observing Him, and that seems pretty clear.

So given this, why do I say it’s a prophetic book? And I’m going to look to just one passage. Obviously, there’s a lot more to this book, but I want to focus in on one passage and just really unpack it. And it begins in Wisdom 2:12, and this is from the perspective of the ungodly and how they’re reasoning. And they say, “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions. He reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training.”

Okay. This is an important detail, because it gives us a frame of what the conflict is about. This is not the righteous man being opposed by the enemies of Israel. This isn’t the Babylonians, this isn’t the Greeks, this isn’t the Romans; this is within Israel itself. The ungodly are not saying, “Hey, we never have heard of the law. How could we have known?” No. They know about the law. They know how they ought to live, and they’re not living up to their own stated standard. That’s the argument going on in Wisdom 2. The ungodly are those who are failing to live by their own training as Jews.

“He,” the righteous man, professes to have knowledge of God and calls himself a child of the Lord.” Now this line is ambiguous because some versions have “a servant of the Lord,” so we’ll get back to that. But you have a hint here. This isn’t just a great prophet or a great preacher; this is someone who claims to be the Son of God.

But we’ll go back to the ungodly. “He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base and he avoids our ways as unclean. He calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father.” So there it is very explicitly. You have a prophet coming along proclaiming one, a happy end, salvation, for the righteous; and two, claiming to be the son of God; and three, criticizing the Jewish leaders of his day who are being called here the ungodly.

So how do they respond to that? Go back to verse 17. They say, “Let us see if his words are true and let us test that will happen at the end of his life. For if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him,” meaning God will help him, “and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, that we might find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for according to what he says, he will be protected.”

So there it is. The ugly plan of the ungodly is, “Okay, if you’re the son of God, we’re going to try to torture and execute you in a shameful way. Because surely if you are God’s son, you can get down from the cross.” Obviously, I’m making it explicitly Christian there, but that’s what the reasoning is here.

Then verse 21, the author jumps in and says, “Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them.” Now that, I’m just going to point out, is an interesting kind of line about the wickedness blinding them. You will find this kind of concept and language picked up, for instance, in the gospel of John, when Jesus talks about the Pharisees as being blind in John 9. And this is one of, if not the earliest, one of the earliest references to wickedness blinding in a pretty explicit way in scripture. I think it would be going too far to say, “Aha, this is a clear quotation from or proof of the use of Wisdom in the New Testament.” But it is one of those things that you have these themes that will be picked up on in the New Testament that are present here in the book of Wisdom.

Okay. “So the ungodly have been blinded by their own wickedness, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hope for the wages of holiness nor discern the prize for blameless souls, for God created man for incorruption and made him in the image of his own eternity.” Now, why is this important? Because remember in Jesus’ day that there’s a debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees about whether there even is a resurrection of the dead. And the Sadducees say no, because the Sadducees only have five books in their Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

And so, here you have in Wisdom a pretty clear prophecy of the fact that there will be a final judgment and there will be eternal life, this notion of something like resurrection. It doesn’t explicitly say bodily resurrection, but it seems to be what’s in mind here, that we are made for incorruption. What is kind of in corruption is that? Well, seemingly bodily incorruption. And we all have been made for the eternity of God. But then, there’s a line that the early Christians loved, “But through the devil’s envy, death entered the world; and those who belong to his party experience it,” that the devil and those who are on the devil’s team experience the corruption the devil brings with him.

So let’s step back and say, “What are the key features from this passage?” First, you’ve got the description of the righteous man in 12 onward, that we want to highlight three things. Number one, “he’s inconvenient to us and opposes our actions.” Again, he’s dealing with a Jewish kind of opponent. Two, “he reproaches the ungodly for sins against the law and of sins against our training.” So he is righteous and opposing those who’ve been trained in the law for not being righteous. And three, “He calls the last end of the righteous happy and boasts that God is his father;” that he’s not just a righteous man, he’s not just a man who keeps the law perfectly, he also claims to be the son of God. That’s the righteous man we’re looking for. And do we see that fulfilled in Jesus? Well, we do.

Jesus says in Matthew chapter five, “Think not that I’ve come to abolish the law and the prophets. I’ve come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” He keeps the law absolutely perfectly. And then, He tells His listeners that, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven;” that Jesus doesn’t come and just say, “The law is horrible, the law is terrible. Why do you have the law?” No, He comes and fulfills it. The reason we’re no longer bound by portions of the Jewish law are they were preparations for the fulfillment they got in Jesus. And He fulfills them by keeping them perfectly.

We also know that Jesus has claimed to be the Son of God. It’s a huge part of why He’s opposed and a huge part of why people try to kill Him. So in John 5:18, John says, “This is why the Jews thought all the more to kill him.” Now, Jews there doesn’t mean all Jewish people; it clearly means the Jewish leaders in context, because He not only broke the Sabbath but also called God His father, making Himself equal with God.

Now, we just heard in the prior verse that Jesus kept the whole law. John’s not saying that Jesus actually broke the Sabbath. In context, he’s very clearly showing that Jesus was accused of breaking the Sabbath because He does things like healing people on the Sabbath. But Jesus is very clear that healing people on the Sabbath is not a violation of what the Sabbath is all about. The Sabbath, this day of rest, a day set aside for God, is not violated in the slightest by doing things that glorify God. In the same way that you wouldn’t say, “Ah, I can’t go to church today; it’s a day of rest,” no, you’re misunderstanding. The day of rest is for the glorification of God, not, “I can’t glorify God because I’m resting.” So in John 5, we see very clearly Jesus is claiming to be the Son of God. And what’s more, this is one of the reasons why His opponents, fellow Jews, want to kill Him.

Okay. So that’s the righteous man. What about the wrath of the ungodly? They want to test Him with insult and torture to find out how gentle He is. That’s an important thing we’re going to get to. They want to condemn Him to a shameful death. And why? They say because if He’s telling the truth, He’ll be protected. And we know in all of this that they are blinded by their own wickedness.

So let’s go to Matthew’s gospel in particular. Matthew 27, we see the brutality of the torture of Jesus, that the soldiers take Jesus into the Pretoria. And they strip Him, they put a scarlet robe upon Him, they put a crown of thorns upon Him, and they put a reed in His right hand. And they kneel before Him and mock Him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews.” And they spit upon Him and they take the reed and they strike Him on the head with it. And when they’d mocked Him, they strip Him of the robe, put His own clothes on Him, and lead Him away to be crucified.

So it’s not just that Jesus dies on the cross; He is horribly tortured and mocked. He is undergoing a very shameful kind of death. When St. Paul talks about the humility of Christ, that He’s willing to die; and not only die, but die on a cross, we can miss how brutal and degrading and shameful this death was intended to be. It’s meant to be dehumanizing. It’s meant to strip you of any dignity you have. It’s more awful than if Jesus had just been executed by firing squad or guillotine or hanging or something like this, where there might be a semblance of dignity nevertheless. Not so here; the point of it is to strip away your dignity.

And all of this we should understand is meant to be a test of Jesus’ gentleness and meekness. Is He going to break? Is He going to snap? Is He going to act in an unrighteous kind of way in the face of humiliation? This is a theological test. Now we think we miss this part, right? We often focus on just look at how much God loved us that He underwent all of this. All of that is good, all of that is true, but there’s more to this as a spiritual test. Because the question is, “Will He be a lamb led silently to the slaughter? Or will He try to fight back?”

I mentioned in another episode, months ago now, that when you look at something like Joseph Smith the founder of Mormonism; Mormons will claim he’s a martyr, but he actually dies in an attempted prison break. He doesn’t go silently to his death. He goes down guns blazing, quite literally. And that’s not true with Jesus. And Jesus is really clear about this. When He’s arrested the night before this, St. Peter pulls out his sword, cuts off the ear of the slave Malchus, and Jesus says to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to the Father and He will at once send me more than 12 legions of angels?”

Okay. So Jesus is willingly enduring this persecution without protests, without fighting back, without doing any of these things. He could stop this at any time. He is very much in control, even in the moments where He is being brutalized and undergoing these dehumanizing sort of actions, being stripped and mocked and all of these things. He could at any point, with a wave of a hand, a snap of a finger, or even less than that, put an end into it. He could call a whole 12 legions of angels. He could, by His own divine power, do all of this. And He doesn’t. So His gentleness is being tested here, and this is what Jesus is making very clear again, especially in Matthew’s gospel.

And then, you have what I think is the most direct kind of parallel here. When Jesus is crucified, we’re told that, “Those who pass by derided Him, wagging their heads and saying, ‘You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.'” And so, the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders mocked him, saying, “He saved others. He cannot save Himself. He is the King of Israel. Let Him come down now from the cross. We’ll believe in Him. He trusts in God. Let God deliver Him now if He desires so, for He said, ‘I am the Son of God.'”

Now notice, that is exactly what Wisdom 2 said the ungodly were going to say in response to the righteous man when they put him to a shameful death. That’s what we see them doing. It’s a direct line between Wisdom 2 and Matthew 27. And so, when you read that, I don’t know how anyone reads that and doesn’t say, “Oh, obviously Wisdom 2 is prophesying Jesus’ death on the cross.”

So we’ve seen the righteous man, we’ve seen the shameful death of the righteous man. We then have the hidden purpose of God, the last few verses of Wisdom 2 that we were looking at. There’s this reference to the wages of holiness and the prize for blameless souls. There’s also this reference to the fact that we were made for incorruption, and that God made us in the image of His own eternity. And then, finally that it was through the devil’s envy that death entered the world.

Now that last point I want to unpack in a minute; but first, I want to look at the other parts: the wages of holiness, the prize for blameless souls. I think many Christians would say, “Oh, no, no, no. We’re not made to be blameless. That’s too high of a bar.” But the Christian message actually is; now you’re meant to be blameless. And the wages of holiness is a serious thing.

And we see this kind of language in a different light in Romans chapter three, where St. Paul is comparing righteousness to the wages of sin. He says very famously in 3:20, that, “When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification, and it’s in eternal life.” So well, then he says, “The wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”

So you’re going to serve one or the other. You’re going to serve either sin or you’re going to serve God in righteousness. If you serve sin, you’ll get the wages that you’ve earned, which is death. If you serve God, it’s not just the wages you’ve earned, it’s still a free gift, but these are the wages of holiness. But it is in response to becoming a slave of God. That’s the return you get. What’s a return? Well, a return is the thing you’ve earned.

But Paul is saying, “Yes, in one sense you’ve earned it, but in another sense, it is a free gift.” So when we’re talking about the wages of holiness, we’re not saying you literally earn your way to heaven, but there is a sense in which your behavior is corresponding to your salvation. We can get into a big theological debate about how all of that works. I’m not going to do that here. All I’m saying is the bit about wages of holiness seems to anticipate St. Paul.

Colossians 1, St. Paul talks about how we were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. But we’ve now been reconciled in the body of Christ by His death in order to present you, meaning us, holy and blameless and irreproachable before Him, provided that you continue in the faith. So if you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel, then you’ll be presented to God holy and blameless and irreproachable, that blamelessness actually is the goal. It’s not just believe and be good enough or believe and don’t worry about how good you are. No, no, no, no, no. Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect is actually the thing we’re striving for. Are we going to fall short of that? Of course we are. But if we’re not striving for perfection, if we’re content to settle for less than perfection, then we’re settling for less than what we’re called to as Christians. So this call to blamelessness that Wisdom talks about is very much at the heart of the Christian kind of calling.

And then finally, 2 Peter 1 talks about His divine power. Now the text is actually ambiguous as to whether that means Christ’s divine power or the Father’s divine power; not important for our purposes. But “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He’s granted to us His precious and very great promises. That through these, you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion and become partakers of the divine nature. That we were made for incorruption. We were not made for corruption; we were made for eternity.”

Now I think all of those things, I’ve got those three verses, any number of New Testament verses would sound the same theme. But all that’s to say Wisdom 2 is anticipating theological themes of the New Testament, saying, “The plan of God is this.”

Now why does that matter? Because the book isn’t just in the right direction theologically, it’s describing things the author couldn’t possibly know about from mere human reasoning. So you can have a book that’s a good book that isn’t inspired. Michael Kruger, who I’m going to get to in a little bit, gives the example of C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis gets quoted all the time in Christian apologetics. I do it, everybody does it. But nobody’s saying we’re only going to quote C.S. Lewis because we believe he’s inspired scripture. Nobody thinks he is. No one’s trying to add C.S. Lewis’s books to the Bible. It’s possible for a book to be really good even though it’s not part of the Bible.

It’s much harder for me to see how a book could accurately predict the future without divine inspiration. In other words, amongst Protestants, you typically have two categories. You’ve got those who say, “We reject these books” or “We ignore these books entirely, these seven disputed books including Wisdom.” And you’ve got others that say, “Oh yeah, these books are fine in terms of human wisdom. They’re helpful, but they’re not inspired scripture.”

And I would suggest that neither of those views could be true if Wisdom 2 is accurately predicting the future; if it’s accurately predicting the coming of the Messiah and describing that He’s going to be the Son of God and He’s going to be put to this shameful death because His own people will reject Him and they will try to test to see if He really is God’s Son, because they’re blinded by their own wickedness. That is arguably a more vivid depiction of the New Testament of the coming of Christ than you find in basically anywhere else in the Old Testament. You can find some other pretty clear depictions of the coming of Christ, but this one might be the clearest, and it’s in a book that Protestants reject.

Okay. So before we get into why Protestants reject the Book of Wisdom, even though it appears to be prophetic, I figured we should probably look at the fact that the early Christians typically accepted the Book of Wisdom. Now I want to be clear, this was not without exception. You will find some debate on the Book of Wisdom. You won’t find it treated universally as scripture, because the early Christians were not unanimously agreed about which books belonged in the Old Testament, just as they were not unanimously agreed about which books belonged in the New Testament. There were some books that were universally accepted and there were some books that were disputed or spoken against. And Wisdom is one that is disputed; not everybody has it in their Bible. Not everybody accepts it. But nevertheless, we do find it all over the place in early Christianity. I have no way of measuring to prove it is overwhelmingly the norm that it is scripture, but I do know that Augustine claims that that’s true, that this was overwhelmingly accepted by everybody as scripture.

So let me give you a little bit of a survey. Now, this is going to be incomplete. You don’t want me to give every citation of the Book of Wisdom throughout early Christianity. But I want to focus on a few key texts, especially early ones. So for instance, First Clement, which has been pretty accurately dated I think to about the year 96. So this is during the lifetime of the Apostle John. Pope St. Clement, who is the bishop of Rome, the third bishop of Rome, appointed by St. Peter, seemingly ordained by Peter to the priesthood, he quotes in his letter about “the ungodly envy by which death itself entered into the world.” Remember that line from Wisdom 2 that I said the early Christians were very fond of quoting? There he is referencing it.

Then jump forward to 180, against heresies. This is the first book, as I like to say, that mentions Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four gospels. This book is a year older than the first time we see the word trinity used if our dating of against heresies is correct, which is about 180. And he has this line in Book Two, chapter 26. Basically, if those who are perfect do not yet understand the very things in their hands on their feet and before their eyes on the earth, how can we believe them regarding things spiritual or super celestial? And those, which with a vain confidence, they assert to be above God? He’s talking about if you don’t even know the basic things around you, how can we believe you on theology? How can we believe you on these spiritual claims?

But he is seemingly borrowing very heavily, very directly from Wisdom 9, that, “We can hardly guess at what is on earth. And what is at hand, we find with labor, but who was traced out what is in the heavens? Who has learned thy counsel unless you have given him wisdom and sent thy Holy Spirit from on high?” So if you compare the claim against heresies too with Wisdom 9, he seems to be, he doesn’t quote it explicitly, but he seems to be taking Wisdom 9:13-17 pretty directly about this connection between natural and supernatural knowledge.

Clement of Alexandria, writing a little later, the end of the 100s, somewhere between about 198 and 203, quotes Wisdom 2:12; and kind of a fascinating passage when he talks about the similarities between what he calls scripture and the writings of Plato. That Plato, with human wisdom, is getting to some things that we have through revealed knowledge through the Bible, through scripture.

But notice that Clement’s argument only works if you accept that Wisdom is actually scripture. That’s in the Stromata. He also refers to the book as divine wisdom later on when he quotes Wisdom 3 and when he talks about the martyrs, which is a beautiful fascinating passage which I decided not to get into, just for the sake of keeping the episode as brief as I can.

Tertullian, writing about 210, writing against Marcion, quotes. He says, “Well, who is this but Christ?” And then he quotes Wisdom 2:12, the beginning of the passage that we were looking at today. “‘Come,’ say they. ‘Let us take away the righteous, because he is not for our turn and he is clean, contrary to our doings.'” That’s a slightly different wording from the translation we have, but it’s very clearly Wisdom 2:12 he’s talking about. And noticeably, Tertullian is saying, “Well, obviously this passage is about Jesus Christ,” which again, yeah, obviously it is.

The apologists of Rome has an expository treatise against the Jews. Now that’s always an awkward thing in kind of Christianity after the Holocaust, right? Anytime you’ve got some Christian writer writing against the Jews, it just makes everybody uncomfortable. But this is important, and I mention it only because this is the early 200s, and you have an apologist writing. He’s seemingly in Rome, we don’t know much about him. A lot of what we do know is questionable, but he is a well-respected early preacher who is debating Judaism at a time, this is before Christianity is a religion of the Empire. Christianity and Judaism are these two kind of weird sects within the Roman Empire that were just like, here are these two bizarre groups that don’t worship the Roman gods. And Jews and Christians understood each other. You find a fair amount of Christian apologetics where they’re saying, on the one hand, “We have to explain to pagans why we believe any of this stuff. On the other hand, we have to explain to Jews why we believe Jesus is the fulfillment of Judaism.”

And he points out this passage in Wisdom 2, and he says, “None of the righteous or prophets called himself the son of God.” Right? When you read in Wisdom 2 that someone is coming along and claiming to be the son of God, that’s not just another Moses. That’s not just another Ezekiel or Elijah. No. This is something greater, and this is the righteous one that we hear in Wisdom 2. So he’s making, I think, a really profound argument, the argument I’m making here, that this passage is again clearly about Jesus Christ, early 200s, right? Mid-200s, maybe in 248, Origen Against Celcus talks about this, that “The Holy Spirit gave signs of His presence at the beginning of Christ’s ministry.”

And then, he quotes in support of this, the fact that, “For the Holy Spirit, discipline will flee deceit and remove from thoughts that are without understanding.” That’s Wisdom 1:5. He just quotes this. He doesn’t explicitly say it’s scripture, but he seems to quote it in a context that would suggest it’s scripture because he just quotes it. He doesn’t say, “A great author says” or “As some have said.” No, no, no. He just treats it like a given, the way we would quote scripture today.

St. Sabrina of Carthage, writing a few years later, maybe 252. Actually we know it’s in 252, and in one of his letters quotes Wisdom 1:13. And he uses the phrase, “It is written,” which is a regular way of introducing scripture. This is one of the clues scholars look for in trying to figure out, “Did the author believe this was scripture or not?” This clue is not infallible, because you can say “It is written” about something that isn’t scripture. But usually, when an author says “It is written,” they mean it is scripture. Scripture, remember, means writings. And so, they’re invoking it not just as a good quote, not just as a good author, but actually as divine scripture. So Sabrina does that in Epistle 51. There actually a lot of passages where Cyprian quotes from Wisdom, but that’s just one clear one.

At the end of the 200s, Saint Methodius, who is a lesser known author, Saint Methodius of Olympus, has this strange, mystical kind of vision that’s a dialogue. And it’s something’s called the Banquet of the Ten Virgins or sometimes it’s called The Symposium. And in it, he says that, “You may not take refuge behind a safe wall, bringing forward the Scripture which says,” and then he quotes from Wisdom. I forgot to include the chapter and verse there, but he quotes from Wisdom. “As for the children of the adulteresses, they shall not come to their perfection.” And then says, “He will answer you easily that we often see those who are unlawfully begotten coming to perfection like ripe fruit.” In other words, don’t misuse this passage of scripture for our purposes. The only thing that’s important there is Methodius is clearly treating Wisdom as scripture that could be misused.

To sum all of this up, I want to jump forward. So, so far, we’ve only been looking at the era before Constantine, before the legalization of Christianity, before the year 300. These are the early days of Christianity. Jump forward now to St. Augustine. He is writing much later, in the 420s, probably at the end of the 420s, in his book, On the Predestination of the Saints. And he says, “And since these things are so, the judgment of the book of Wisdom ought not to be repudiated. Why? Since for so long, a course of years, that book has deserved to be read in the Church of Christ, from the station of the readers of the Church of Christ.”

What does that mean? It means people are not just reading this in their homes, they’re proclaiming this in the mass. This is one of the readings, like people read the Old Testament in the New Testament in church, both in Catholic and Protestant churches. You’re not going to get up and say, “A reading from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.” No. So when you have a book read in a liturgical context in church, that shows that it’s being treated not just as a good book, but as a divine book, as a book that has God as its author.

So he says, “Since for so long, a course of years,” that’s been the case. “And it’s been heard by all Christians from bishops downwards, even to the lowest lay believers, penitents, and catechumens with the veneration paid to divine authority.” So he’s saying very explicitly, “Everybody, from the top to the bottom of the church, for centuries has been treating this book as divine scripture.” Augustine is abundantly clear on this point.

This is really important, because many times Protestants will say, “The reason we don’t accept this Book is the early Christians didn’t accept this book.” And that’s just not true. That is false. That is inaccurate history. You can say everybody from bishops downwards, even to the lowest lay believers, got it wrong. But you can’t plausibly say that long list of people I just quoted from didn’t actually believe the things they told you they believe, because that’s just denying the nose on your face.

Augustine goes on in the next chapter and he says, “If any wish to be instructed in the opinions of those who have handled the subject, it behooves them to prefer to all commentators the book of Wisdom.” And why does he say that? And he quotes there Wisdom 4:11, because illustrious commentators, even in the times nearest to the apostles, preferred it to themselves. In other words, Augustine is arguing, that from the time of the apostles until his own time, authors trusted the book of Wisdom more than they trusted their own theological insights. It was being treated as carrying divine authority.

So again, you will actually find exceptions to that. Augustine does not mean to say every person without exception believes that. He clearly doesn’t think that. But he is saying there is this overall consensus in favor of the Book of Wisdom.

So why isn’t the book in Protestant Bibles? And I have not found a good argument against the Book of Wisdom directly. What I find instead are vague arguments against all of the books, and these arguments tend to be weak or inaccurate or outright wrong. I’m going to get into a couple of them, one from a popular kind of presenter and one from a more scholarly figure. There may be other ones. If you think there’s a better argument I’m missing, please jump down and include it in the comments below.

I will try to take a look and see if there’s some good argument I’m missing, because I really have scoured to try to give the best version of the argument from a Protestant perspective. Because here’s what we’re weighing. On the one hand, you’ve got the fact this book appears to be divine scripture. It accurately does things only scripture can do, like foretells the future. And two, it was treated as scripture by the early Christians throughout the earliest days of Christianity. Literally, at the time the apostles are alive, we see Clement citing from the passage about how this is how sin enters the world through envy, which is a line from Wisdom 2. And we see it being treated explicitly, Augustine says, with the way of divine authority. And this is again, this is not like Augustine in his age suddenly decided, “We’re going to start treating Wisdom as an inspired book.” No, no, no. He’s saying, “This is how it’s always been.”

So in light of that, what would be the arguments against it? I’m going to start with the popular guy and then I’m going to go to the scholarly guy. So the popular guy is Michael Pearl, and here’s his argument.

So here’s the proof. Here’s the absolute, unequivocal scientific proof that the Apocrypha Books, Books the Catholics have got, are not the Word of God. Do you want it? The New Testament quotes the Old Testament 855 times, 800, about 100 times in the book of Matthew, if I remember correctly. And so, out of 25 chapters, that’d be four times per chapter, so on the average. And the book of Hebrews, it’s nothing but quotes strung together from the Old Testament. Every book in the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament, every one of them. Now, how many times did the Apocrypha quote the Old Testament? None. How come the apostles didn’t quote from it? How come Jesus didn’t quote from it? How come they didn’t present it as a reliable source of truth?

Okay, so that’s the argument from silence. Now, I just want to say at the outset, that’s a bad argument. Let’s say for the sake of argument that that’s true, that there 850 quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament. That’s not actually true, but let’s say it is for a second, and this didn’t get quoted. Would that prove it’s not divinely inspired? No. This would still be an argument from silence. You can consider a book divinely inspired and not happen to mention it in your own writings. There’s no claim anybody is making that every part of the Old Testament gets quoted, whether you’re Protestant or Catholic.

In fact, we can see this very clearly. So why do we know that? Well, there’s a book called Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament by Gleason Archer and Gregory Chirichigno, I may be butchering his name and I apologize for that, in which these two Protestant authors attempt to just find every time the New Testament quotes the Old Testament.

Now here it’s important to highlight a distinction that is not being made by Michael Pearl in the video you just heard. There’s a difference between a quotation and an allusion and a reference. And so, when we’re talking about quotations of the Old Testament, there’s only about 200. Now, this is going to be a really important kind of distinction, because when we’re talking about quotations yeah, sure, the seven books that are disputed between Catholics and Protestants are not quoted directly. But neither are a lot of other books.

So in this book, Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament, they list every quotation as I said. Many of these only have one quotation. So for instance, Jonah is never quoted. Now you’ll see, if you are looking at this screen, entry 298, but when you go to it, they’ll say, “Well, it’s not actually a quotation. He references Jonah, but he never quotes him.” So in Matthew 16, Jesus referenced the sign of Jonah, and he talks about Jonah being in the belly of the whale. He never actually quotes the text.

In fact, there are 10 books in the Protestant Old Testament that are never quoted even once in the New Testament: Judges, Ruth, Ezra, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Obadiah, Jonah, and Zephaniah. So if you’re going to say, “Any book that isn’t quoted in the New Testament must not be scripture,” you’re going to have to take 10 books out of the Protestant Bible, or you’re going to say, “Well, it doesn’t have to be quoted, it can just be alluded to or referenced.” Okay, well then we get into a much bigger debate, because it’s not always clear which things are and aren’t references.

So for instance, in Hebrews 11, there appears to be a reference to the writings of First and Second Maccabees. Most scholars I think, would agree with that, but some might disagree. It doesn’t explicitly say that the woman whose sons are being tortured is the example from the Maccabees. Okay, well, you get into much murkier waters. But the point is, the argument from silence that the seven books that are in dispute were never directly quoted is a particularly weak argument in light of that. And so, watch out for this, because it’s not just that there’s 10 books you’d have to take out of the Protestant Bible. You also have things like St. Paul quoting pagan authors. Quotation is just not an accurate predictor of canonicity or inspiration.

And so, you’ll hear Protestants using four different standards, depending on what suits their purposes. And I’m not saying they’re intentionally using a double standard or really a quadruple standard, but this is often how it ends up. So if you want to include a book, you’ll say, “Well, an allusion or a reference is enough.” That’s one standard. And second, a mention. Third, a quotation. Fourth, a quotation using an invocation like “It is written,” because obviously, we don’t have pagan authors included in the Old Testament. And so, people would say, “Yeah sure, Paul quotes them. He even says he is quoting them, but that doesn’t count because he doesn’t say, ‘It is written.'”

Well, choose a standard. If your standard is every book not quoted directly is not scripture, is every book quoted scripture? What is the actual standard being applied here? And there isn’t one. So this isn’t just an argument from silence. This argument is really tricky in using multiple standards, where it holds Catholic books to one standard and Protestant books to a much lower standard. That if you were to consistently apply that you either have to include Catholic books or cut out Protestant ones, and neither of those is workable. I’m going to let Pearl kind of continue, partly because I just really enjoy watching the guy work.

Why they just quote from the books of Moses and the Psalms. Now, there is one place in the book of Enoch, which probably was written after the New Testament, at least that portion of it, and it’s very similar. It’s in Jude 1:14-15, and then in Enoch 1, the was two Enochs, 1:9, “The Lord will come with 10,000 of His saints to execute judgment upon the ungodly and against the ungodly, so forth, the ungodly deeds which the ungodly committed.”

Okay. Now I just want to unpack a couple things. One, First Enoch is not in Catholic Bibles. So if you’re arguing against the books that Catholics have and Protestants don’t, then your example is a book Catholics don’t have, you don’t know what you’re talking about, right? But second, this totally undermines his argument. He’s going to say one quotation is not enough? Well, actually, I’m going to let him say it so it doesn’t look like I’m putting words in his mouth. So here is Michael Pearl.

So there’s something very similar to that in the book of Enoch, which may have been taken from the New Testament, or they both may have shared another resource. But one very similar statement out of all of those books would hardly point to them being trusted as the Words of God for Jesus and the apostles.

Okay. So apparently, you don’t even just have the standard of it has to be quoted in the New Testament; it has to be quoted multiple times in the New Testament. Well, why is that a problem? Go back to the list and you’ll see there are several examples. Joshua, First Chronicles, Second Chronicles, Second Kings, Joel, Nahum, and Haggai, where they’re only quoted one time a piece in the New Testament. So if one New Testament quotation is not enough to establish it, you’re introducing some new evidentiary standard, then you’ve got to cut all those books out of your Bible too, because as he says, Jude appears to quote First Enoch.

So quotation is just not a good standard. The mere fact that a book isn’t quoted does not mean that it’s not inspired. And the mere fact that a book is quoted doesn’t mean that it is inspired. This might be helpful evidence, particularly if it’s quoted explicitly as scripture, “It is written.” That’s a great clue, but you cannot just say, especially the lack of quotation means that it wasn’t considered inspired, because that would require you to quote the entire Old Testament to have a New Testament. And the New Testament is shorter than the Old Testament. That definitely didn’t happen.

Okay. That, as I said, is the popular presentation. Here’s the maybe more scholarly one. This is Michael Kruger. Now in Kruger’s defense, I’m going to say he doesn’t know a lot about the subject he’s talking about, but that’s because his work is on the New Testament Canon. So when he gets into the Old Testament Canon, he is scholarly by the standards of a lot of the people we’re dealing with. He’s one of the few people I see regularly cited by Protestants to try to bolster the scholarly case, but his work is just not on the Old Testament. His work is on the New Testament.

These are seven Old Testament books being disputed, and so he’s often a little vague and doesn’t seem to want to talk about the subject, but people keep asking him about it. Because when he talks about New Testament books and how do we get the books of the New Testament Bible, people obviously, quite naturally want to ask, “What about the Old Testament?” Because that’s where the actual dispute is between Catholics and Protestants. We have the same New Testament. And so, if you’re arguing against someone who says we should have the Gospel of Thomas, then sure, you need to know where the New Testament came from. But for Catholic/Protestant conversations, we’re not worried about that. We agree on all that stuff. Where did the Old Testament come from?

So this is from a Q&A, and so I give that as a little bit of background. I hope that didn’t sound insulting to him. I don’t mean it to be. I mean to say he’s being asked about a subject that he actually made pretty clear in his talk preceding this, he was not trying to get into, and then he gets asked about it anyway. Nevertheless, here he is kind of explaining, from maybe a more scholarly Protestant perspective, the Protestant argument.

So if you remember the term The Apocrypha, is usually referring to a collection of technically Old Testament books, although they’re really Intertestamental books adopted by the Roman Catholic Church and not by Protestants. This was part of the conflict at the Protestant Reformation. So if you know a Roman Catholic, they’re going to have books in their Old Testament that are different than your Old Testament. Those books are books like First, Second Maccabees, Judith and Tobit, et cetera. Why do Roman Catholics have those now? Well, it was adopted formally at what’s called the Council of Trent in the 16th century as sort of a counter-Reformation move.

Okay. I’ve said this last week, I’m just pausing here to say, that is really false. It is very misleading history, because it makes it sound like prior to 1546, these were not in Catholic Bibles, and that’s just not true. The Latin Vulgate had these books in there. These were… You just heard a long list of people from the early church who were quoting this as scripture.

And so, it’s true, in 1546, the entire Bible Canon was infallibly declared by the Council of Trent. That was the first time it had been infallibly declared. That wasn’t the first time the Bible existed. And so, even prior to the Reformation, I’ve mentioned this before too, at the Council of Florence, you have the church declaring which books are in the Bible, and it’s the 73 books of the Catholic Bible, including the seven disputed books. That can’t possibly be a response to the Reformation, because the Reformation hadn’t happened yet.

And so, when you hear that claim, there’s a true fact buried under a mound of falsehoods that gives a very misleading impression. It is not true that the church added these books in response to the Reformation. That is simply historically false, and any reasonable scholar would tell you that. Okay.

That’s the first time the church officially received those books, that is, the Roman Catholic Church. The real question you probably want to know the answer to is why don’t we have it in our Bibles? Here’s the reason. Our New Testament authors, Paul, Peter, John, the gospel authors including Jesus, within those cite the Old Testament hundreds and hundreds of times. Not a single time ever do they cite a book from The Apocrypha in scripture.

Okay. So you’ll notice it’s the same misleading claim, because again, are we saying citations like quotations, allusions, references? How many times? Because if we’re doing quotations, it’s not hundreds of them. It’s two hundred. If you want to call that hundreds and hundreds of times, I think you’re misusing hundreds and hundreds, but fair enough. But then, you also have to be ready to throw out 10 books at the Protestant Old Testament. Go on.

Not even once. And so, the Protestants basically have the same Old Testament, we argue, that Jesus and the Apostles had in their day.

Okay. Now I just want to point that out, because that’s also not true. Because overwhelmingly, the citations to the Old Testament in the New Testament are from what’s called The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament. And every copy of The Septuagint that we have has some or all of these disputed books. There’s no copy of The Septuagint that matches the Protestant Old Testament. So to just assert, “Because we don’t have direct quotations, therefore they must have had the same Old Testament we do,” is really poor scholarship and really poor argumentation. You can’t get from A to B. If you go through this entire video and say, “You know what? He didn’t even mention the Book of Ruth. He must not believe in the Book of Ruth.” That would be an absurd conclusion to draw from that. The mere fact that a book goes unmentioned doesn’t mean it’s not considered inspired. But I’ll continue.

That’s why we have a different Old Testament Canon. We’re going to argue that it is one that was originally there for Israel, but that was added later by Roman Catholics at the Council of Trent.

Okay. So you see quite clearly there that he’s saying that prior to the Council of Trent, 1546, this was the Christian Bible. And hopefully you’ve seen from that long list, you see now why I quoted so many early Christian authors, and then Augustine saying, “Yeah, basically everybody had this book.” That this is just even scholars just telling flagrantly false historical facts, and that’s the defense. Here’s a book that appears to be prophetic and was accepted by the early Christians. And Protestants just say, “Oh, no, no, no. They didn’t accept it.” But they’re telling you they did.

Okay. Then the other guy, I actually don’t know who the other guy is with him, and he’s going to make Kruger uncomfortable by saying some historically inaccurate things, but I’ll let him talk.

… Roman Catholics at the Council of Trent.

Did you talk about the Council of Jamnia? I know I was late to your…

I did not talk about that.

But no Apocrypha books recognized in that.

No.

And then, the other one that I’ve thought is interesting is Jerome himself, when translating the Apocryphal books, basically has this note, “These are not part of the Bible.”

Yeah. So there was a-

So I really enjoyed that part, just because I don’t know if you’re watching this, you probably saw how uncomfortable Michael Kruger got there. And I was tickled, because he knows the Council of Jamnia is a nonsensical 19th century kind of Protestant claim; that there was some Jewish council that met in the late first century that set the Old Testament Canon for Jews. That does not appear to be historically true. And he will go on to say that that is not historically true.

But for a long time, this was a common argument against the Catholic Bible, like, “Well, it contradicts the Council of Jamnia.” Even so, the Council of Jamnia allegedly existed in the year 90, so after Christianity. And so, it’d be very strange to say, “Oh, well, later Jews rejected these books, and so you have to go back and take them out of the Bible now.” It’s a weird argument, but in any case, the Council of Jamnia didn’t exist. And Kruger knows that, and he’s going to talk about that in a minute. But he’s also going to talk about Jerome now.

Big fight between Jerome and Augustine over this. So when we say they were not formally received by the church until Trent, that’s not to say they weren’t ever used or debated. And the debate goes all the way back to Augustine and Jerome.

Okay. So I actually, I wanted to include that part because he’s actually doing the work. This is what separates a popular guy like Michael Pearl from someone like Michael Kruger who is actually saying, “Okay, okay. Granted, they weren’t officially infallibly declared until the 1500s, but yeah, they were still used.”

Now he’s still not getting the history right. He’s saying it goes back to Augustine and Jerome. But Augustine says that’s not true. And a whole series of authors before Augustine have these books. So it would be easy, as a Protestant listening to this, to say, “Oh, okay. In Augustine’s day, they must have added that book.” Nope, not true. They had it before that. And we see this very clearly in numerous citations. And Augustine saying basically everyone from the bishop down to the ordinary layman down to the catechumen treats this book as having divine authority. Even the people who aren’t even in the church yet know this is in the Bible. That’s Augustine’s argument. He’s not saying this is some newfangled thing we just added. He’s saying from the time of the apostles this was the case. So I’ll go back to Kruger again.

Yeah, that’s correct.

Okay. Sort of the same subject area. Are there any Apocryphal books that would still be helpful to read or study? Obviously not scripture, but for any educational purposes…

Yes. So it depends how we define Apocryphal. But I’ll tell you a little interesting story here about the way the early church used Apocryphal writings. A number of Orthodox church fathers would sometimes quote and use Apocryphal gospels. It’s pretty rare, but did it from time to time. They wouldn’t use them as scripture, but they would use them as helpful.

So what you have to realize about writings outside the New Testament is that they may contain true things even if they don’t contain scriptural things. So remember, something can be true without being scriptural. Encyclopedias can be true. That doesn’t mean they’re scripture. So all scripture is true, but not all true things are scripture. And so, you can use true things outside the Canon for purposes other than you would use a scriptural book for, and we have church fathers that do that from time to time. You have to be very cautious with that. There’s other non-Canonical writings, which the term Apocryphal doesn’t quite apply to that are Orthodox, that are edifying for the early church, books like First Clement, the Didache, Shepherd of Hermas. These aren’t technically Apocryphal works, but they’re non-Canonical works that can be beneficial.

Okay. Now notice all the examples he cited were New Testament. That’s because again, he’s a New Testament scholar, not an Old Testament scholar. So this is a very confusing answer to the question. And he highlights, it depends on what you mean by Apocryphal. When he’s thinking about Apocryphal books, he’s thinking about things like the Gospel of Thomas, or he’s thinking about other books that were written in the Christian era by Christian authors but aren’t in the Bible.

But that’s not what the actual question is about in terms of these seven disputed Old Testament books. And so, he gives an answer that sounds like, “Oh, well, the early Christians used them, but only as helpful writings.” Again, the way you might use something like C.S. Lewis. He’s going to give that example later on.

And that’s just flatly not true when we’re talking about the Book of Wisdom, when we’re talking about the seven disputed books. They’re actually described as scripture by the early Christians. They’re quoted explicitly as scripture. Divine wisdom says, “It is written,” those kind of things, “As it says in scripture.” So you have those invocations in the first 200 years of Christianity. You don’t have that with the Gospel of Thomas being used by anyone remotely Christian.

So this shows that even this… So I guess to step back, what can we draw from this? The Protestant arguments against the Book of Wisdom and the seven disputed books more broadly tends to be, one, mired with historical confusion and falsehoods, confusing New Testament disputed books with Old Testament disputed books. We saw that last week with Todd Friel. We see the confusion being propagated by Michael Kruger, although I think unintentionally. He knows that these are Old Testament books. But then, when he’s asked about the Apocryphal books, he starts talking about New Testament books. That’s very confusing as an answer.

You also have these regular false claims that make it sound like the Catholic Church either didn’t have a Bible or had a 66-book Bible until after the Reformation. None of that’s true. The Bible wasn’t infallibly sealed. In other words, it hadn’t had an infallible declaration.

You could think about it this way. You could go back and find the first time the Southern Baptist Convention officially declared its opposition to gay marriage. I don’t know when that was. I haven’t done the work, but I’m betting it was relatively recently because gay marriage wasn’t a big thing. Southern Baptists, when they first formed, were Baptists who wanted to preserve slavery. They were not about trying to preserve marriage. And so, it was much later that they got into the preserving marriage game. That doesn’t mean that they were fine with gay marriage until whatever point that was, 1990, 2000, whenever you’re going to find the first declarations against gay marriage. It doesn’t mean they were okay with gay marriage before that; they just hadn’t had a need to define it.

Well, so too, when the Bible was broadly received in 73 books, you don’t need an official church council to define it, win the reformer, and until one of two things happens. One, you have something like the Orthodox and Coptic wanting to rejoin the church and saying, “What is our common belief?” That’s what happens in the 15th century. It’s the Council of Florence. Or two, you have Protestants who say, “We actually reject the Bible we were given.” And now you do have to define the Bible, in the same way that if you reinvent marriage, now I have to define what marriage is. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t believe that before; I just hadn’t had to define it before.

So those are the things. We see very bad arguments against the Book of Wisdom being inspired scripture. Here’s a book that, by its own internal evidence, appears to accurately prophesy Christ and was received by the early Christians as doing just that and as actually being scriptural. So I would leave to my readers, viewers, listeners, whatever you are, a challenge. If you think this book doesn’t belong in the Bible, why not? For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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