that many
have supposed an elder Philo as the author. That the second and third
chapters allude to Christ is a groundless hypothesis. The 'just man' is
called 'the son of God', Jehovah, [Greek: pais Kyrion];--but Christ's
specific title which was deemed blasphemous by the Jews, was 'Ben
Elohim', [Greek: uhios tou Theou];--and the fancy that Philo was a
Christian in heart, but dared not openly profess himself such, is too
absurd. Why no traces in his latest work, or those of his middle age?
Why not the least variation in his religious or philosophical creeds in
his latter works, written long after the resurrection, from those
composed by him before, or a few years after, Christ's birth? Some of
Philo's earlier works must have been written when our Lord was in his
infancy, or at least boyhood.

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 s