In short, just take all those passages of Philo which most closely resemble others in the Wisdom of Solomon, and contain the same or nearly the same thoughts, and write them in opposite columns, and no doubt will remain that Philo was not the composer of the Book of Wisdom.  Philo subtle, and with long involved periods knit together by logical connectives:  the Book of Wisdom sententious, full of parallelisms, assertory and Hebraistic throughout.  It was either composed by a man who tried to Hebraize the Greek, or, if a translator, by one who tried to Greecise the Hebraisms of his original—­not to disguise or hide them—­but only so as to prevent them from repelling or misleading the Greek reader.  The different use of the Greek particles in the Wisdom of Solomon, and in the works of Philo, is sufficient to confute the hypothesis of Philo being the author.  As little could it have been written by a Christian.  For it could not have been a Christian of Palestine, from the overflowing Alexandrine Platonism;—­nor a Christian at all; for it contradicts the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and in no wise connects any redemptory or sacrificial virtue with the death of his ’just man’;—­denies original sin in the Christian sense, and explains the vice and virtue of mankind by the actions of the souls of men in a state of pre-existence.  No signs or miracles are referred to in the account of ‘the just man’; and that it was intended as a generalization is evident from the change of the singular into the plural number in the third chapter.

The result is, in my judgment, that this Book was composed by an unknown Jew of Alexandria, either sometime before, or at the same time with, Christ.  I do not think St. Paul’s parallel passages amount to any proof of quotation or allusion;—­they contain the common doctrine of the spiritualized Judaism in the Cabala;—­and yet the work could scarcely have been written long before Christ, or it would certainly have been quoted or mentioned by Philo, and most probably by Josephus.  And this, too, is an answer to the splendid and well-supported hypothesis of its being a translation from a Chaldaic original, composed by Jerubbabel.  The variations of the Syriac translation,—­which are so easily explained by translating the passage into the Chaldaic, when the cause of the mistake in the Greek or of the variation in the Syriac, is seen at once,—­are certainly startling; but they are too free; and how could the Fathers, Jerome for example, remain ignorant of the existence of this Chaldaic original?  My own opinion is, as I said before, that the Book was written in Greek by an Alexandrian Jew, who had formed his style on that of the LXX., and was led still further to an imitation of the Old Testament manner by the nature of his fiction, and as a dramatic propriety, and yet deviated from it partly on account of the very remoteness of his Platonic conceptions from the simplicity and poverty of the Hebrew; and partly because of the wordy rhetoric epidemic in Alexandria:  and that it was written before the death, if not the birth, of Christ, I am induced to believe, because I do not think it probable that a book composed by a Jew, who had confessed Christ after the resurrection, would so soon have been received by the Christians, and so early placed in the very next rank to works of full inspiration.