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The Christian theologian Augustine uses the Wisdom of Solomon as an authoritative source for teaching and theology, echoing its reflection that the elements of the natural world point to a creator, showing how he was influenced by Jewish traditions.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Wisdom of Solomon 13:9
Deuterocanon
7 For they diligently search while living among his works, and they trust their sight that the things that they look at are beautiful. 8 But again even they are not to be excused. 9 For if they had power to know so much, that they should be able to explore the world, how is it that they didn’t find the Sovereign Lord sooner? 10 But they were miserable, and their hopes were in dead things, who called them gods which are works of men’s hands, gold and silver, skillfully made, and likenesses of animals, or a useless stone, the work of an ancient hand. 11 Yes and some woodcutter might saw down a tree that is easily moved, skillfully strip away all its bark, and fashion it in attractive form, make a useful vessel to serve his life’s needs.
Date: 50 BCE – 50 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
Augustine, Confessions 5.3
Early Christian
Let me now lay bare in the sight of God the twenty-ninth year of my age. There had just come to Carthage a bishop of the Manicheans named Faustus, a great snare of the devil; and many were entangled by him through the charm of his eloquence. Now, even though I found this eloquence admirable, I was beginning to distinguish the charm of words from the truth of things, which I was eager to learn. Nor did I consider the dish as much as I did the kind of food that their famous Faustus served up to me in it. His fame had gone before him as a man very skilled in honorable learning and preeminently skilled in the liberal arts. And as I had already read and stored up in memory many of the injunctions of the philosophers, I began to compare some of their doctrines with the tedious fables of the Manicheans; and it struck me that the probability was on the side of the philosophers, whose power reached far enough to enable them to form a fair judgment of the world, even though they had not discovered the sovereign Lord of it all. For you are great, Lord, and you have regard for the lowly, but you know the proud from afar. You draw near to none but the contrite in heart, and cannot be found by the proud, even if in their inquisitive skill they may number the stars and the sands, and map out the constellations, and trace the courses of the planets.
Date: 397–400 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... the West, further from the home of the Hebrew canon, and knowing the Old Testament chiefly through the Latin version of the LXX, did not scruple to mingle non-canonical books with the canonical. Hilary and Ruffinus were doubtless checked, the one by the influence of Eastern theologians, the other by the scholarship of Jerome; but Hilary mentions that there were those who wished to raise the number of the canonical books to twenty-four by including Tobit and Judith in the canon. From the end of the fourth century the inclusion of the non-canonical books in Western lists is a matter of course. Even Augustine has no scruples on the subject; he makes the books of the Old Testament forty-four (de doctr. Chr. ii. 13 "his xliv libris Testamenti Veteris terminatur auctoritas"), and among them Tobit, Judith, and two books of Maccabees take rank with the histories; and the two Wisdoms, although he confesses that they were not the work of Solomon, are classed with the Prophets. His judgement was that of his Church ("sunt canonicae scripturae Salomonis libri quinque ... Tobias, Judith ... Machabaeorum libri duo"). The African Church had probably never known any other canon, and its belief prevailed wherever the Latin Bible was read ..."
Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek: With an Appendix Containing the Letter of Aristeas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900).
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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