On a reperusal of this Book, I rather believe that these latter chapters never formed part of any other work, but were composed as a sort of long explanatory Postscript, with particular bearing on certain existing circumstances, to which this part of the Jewish history was especially applicable.  Nay, I begin to find the silence of Philo and Josephus less inexplicable, and to imagine that I discover the solution of this problem in the very title of the Book.  No one expects to find any but works of authenticity enumerated in these writers; but to this a work, calling itself the Wisdom of Solomon, both being a fiction and never meant to pass for anything else, could make no pretensions.  To have approximated it to the Holy Books of the nation would have injured the dignity of the Jewish Canon, and brought suspicion on the genuine works of Solomon, while it would have exposed to a charge of forgery a composition which was in itself only an innocent dramatic monologue.  N. B. This hypothesis possesses all the advantages, and involves none of the absurdity of that which would attribute the ‘Ecclesiasticus’ to the infamous Jason, the High Priest.  More than one commentator, I find, has suspected that the Wisdom of Solomon and the second book of Maccabees were by the same author.  I think this nothing.

Ib. p. 36.

Philo throws out a number of declarations, that shew his own and the Jewish belief in a secondary sort of God, a God subordinate in origin to the Father of all, yet most intimately united with him, and sharing his most unquestionable honours.

The belief of the Alexandrian Jews who had acquired Greek philosophy, no doubt;—­but of the Palestine Jews?

Ib. 2. p. 48.

St. John also is witnessed by a heathen (Amelius,) and by one who put him down for a barbarian, to have represented the Logos as “the Maker of all things,” as “with ’God’,” and as “God.”  And St. John is attested to have declared this, “not even as shaded over, but on the contrary as placed in full view.”

Stranger still.  Whitaker could scarcely have read the Greek.  Amelius says, that these truths, if stripped of their allegorical dress, ([Greek:  metapephrasmena ek taes tou Barbarou theologias]) would be plain;—­that is, that John in an allegory, as of one particular man, had shadowed out the creation of all things by the Logos, and the after union of the Logos with human nature,—­that is, with all men.  That this is his meaning, consult Plotinus.

Ib. 9. p. 107.

  “Seest thou not,” adds Philo, in the same spirit of subtilizing being
  into power, and dividing the Logos into two.

Who that had even rested but in the porch of the Alexandrian philosophy, would not rather say, ’of substantiating powers and attributes into being?’ What is the whole system from Philo to Plotinus, and thence to Proclus inclusively, but one fanciful process of hypostasizing logical conceptions and generic terms?  In Proclus it is Logolatry run mad.