Apocryphal Wisdom

I remember when I was studying biblical literature as an undergraduate in Chicago. The professor at my Protestant, dispensationalist school said that the books of the Apocrypha were good for reading but not suitable to belong in the canon of the Bible. He compared them to a good piece of religious writing we might pick up from the campus bookstore. I remember my classmates giving each other sanctified nods. Yes, this was a proper attitude toward those Apocryphal books that some OTHER churches (Catholic, Orthodox) included in their Bible.

If you want to understand the New Testament better, go and get yourself a Bible that includes the Apocrypha (many NRSV Bibles have it).
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For the uninitiated, let me explain a little about the Apocrypha before I get to my musing for the day. This is a group of writings generally written later than the Hebrew scriptures and before the New Testament. In a Catholic Bible, you will find them integrated with the rest of the Bible text. In other Bibles, like my NRSV plus Apocrypha, they are separated out into their own section.

The books of the Apocrypha are great examples of Second Temple Jewish literature (as are the books of the Bible written during that time, including all of the New Testament). The Apocrypha is only a small part of Second Temple Jewish literature, however. There are a large number of books that no religious group today includes in their canon of scripture. These have all been lumped together into a third category: Pseudepigrapha.

So, to make that simple, we have sort of three levels of Second Temple Jewish writings: the Biblical canon, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha.

My musing for today will be about the Wisdom of Solomon. This is a text that was not written by Solomon, but was written much later, perhaps around 100 B.C.E. in Alexandria, Egypt (where a massive Jewish community once resided). Of all the books of the Apocrypha, this one book had the most influence on the developing church. When you read it, you can see why. This may sound strange, but the Wisdom of Solomon is primarily a book about God’s judgment and what righteous living really means. That may not sound like a topic you’d rush to read about, but the book really is quite interesting.

Here’s how it begins in the NRSV translation:

Love righteousness, you rulers of the earth,
think of the Lord in goodness
and seek him with sincerity of heart;
because he is found by those who do not put him to the test,
and manifests himself to those who do not distrust him.

The author says some interesting things in the first few chapters of this nineteen chapter work. I like what Wisdom 1:7-8 tell us:

Because the Spirit of the Lord has filled the world,
and that which holds all things together knows what is said,
therefore those who utter unrighteous things will not escape notice,
and justice, when it punishes, will not pass them by.

In other words, God fills this world with his Spirit. He sees all and hears all (the rabbis add that he writes all in a book!). Therefore, don’t think you can escape judgment for your wicked words.

What reason would someone have to think they could escape the notice of God’s judgment? Wisdom goes on to explain how the wicked