HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does Paul's use of the Wisdom of Solomon (≈7 times) show he received it as Scripture?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — for the leap from a tally of allusions to canonicity; the allusions themselves are sound. That Paul knew the Wisdom of Solomon intimately and drew on it repeatedly — Romans 1’s indictment of idolatry tracking Wisdom 13–14, Romans 9’s potter-and-vessels echoing Wisdom 15, the armor of God at Ephesians 6 reworking Wisdom 5 — is granted across confessions; Bruce Metzger judged that “there can be little doubt that the Apostle had at one time made a close study” of the book. But the inference built on it — that so many echoes show Paul “considered Wisdom as part of his Bible” — does not hold on its best case: an unmarked allusion is not a citation as Scripture, Paul never once introduces Wisdom with “it is written,” and the same apostle quotes the pagan poets Aratus, Epimenides, and Menander more directly than he ever quotes Wisdom without anyone supposing he canonized them — so a count of echoes, however high, cannot carry canonical status. (Wisdom’s real case for canonicity rests not on the tally but on its continuous reception — the Septuagint, the Muratorian Fragment, and a long line of Fathers who cite it as Scripture.) · the affirmative Catholic mirror of the “never quoted” silence argument and the exact twin of the Hebrews 11:35 / 2 Maccabees case

Related arguments: the New Testament’s use of Maccabees, Wisdom, and Enoch — see also does Hebrews 11:35’s allusion to 2 Maccabees 7 show the NT treats the deuterocanon as Scripture? (weak), its exact twin for a different book, and does Jude’s quoting 1 Enoch as prophecy show the Old Testament canon was still open? (contested). The full register of the deuterocanonical allusions, and the scholarly debate over whether they rise to scriptural use, is laid out on the companion “never quoted” page.

Here the sub-claim is the standard Catholic answer to the Protestant “the New Testament never quotes the deuterocanon”: that Paul drew on the Wisdom of Solomon so often that he must have reckoned it Scripture.

The claim

… now Saint Paul the Apostle quotes the Book of Wisdom about seven times, so clearly Saint Paul the Apostle also held this belief and considered Wisdom as part of his Bible or set of documents.

— Dr. Taylor Marshall, podcast ep. 968, Nephilim: Bible Children of Demons? (2023).¹ Marshall raises the point in the course of arguing that the giants-perished-in-the-Flood tradition is canonical — the Wisdom of Solomon reads Noah’s Flood as the destruction of “the proud giants” (Wisdom 14:6, Greek gigántōn), and Paul, who drew on Wisdom repeatedly, is presumed to have shared that belief and to have counted the book among his Scriptures. Two claims are bundled and want weighing apart. The first is a tally: that Paul alludes to Wisdom “about seven times.” The second is the inference the tally is enlisted to serve: that this many echoes show Paul “considered Wisdom as part of his Bible.” (The giants/Flood content of Wisdom 14:6 itself — its bearing on the Nephilim — is a separate question, weighed on the Wisdom of Solomon page of the Nephilim timeline; this page takes up only the canon kernel.)

Who advances it

“Paul quotes Wisdom, so Paul held Wisdom as Scripture” is a stock Catholic and Orthodox answer to the Protestant argument from apostolic silence, and the affirmative mirror of it — the same move the Hebrews 11:35 / 2 Maccabees case makes for a different book. Taylor Marshall states it in its blunt, counted form (“about seven times … so clearly … part of his Bible”). But the underlying observation is not partisan: that Paul knew and used Wisdom is registered by the critical Greek New Testament’s own apparatus and granted across the scholarly spectrum. What divides the parties is not whether Paul echoed Wisdom but what the echoes prove — deep acquaintance and use, or canonical status.²

The evidence for the allusions

The parallels are real, and the tally is defensible. Paul’s dependence on the Wisdom of Solomon is one of the best-attested cases of a New-Testament writer’s use of a deuterocanonical book. The clearest instance is Romans 1:18–32, whose whole argument — the invisible God known from the created order, that knowledge suppressed, worship transferred to the creature, and moral collapse following as the penalty — runs the sequence of Wisdom 13–14 (“the worshipping of idols … is the beginning, the cause, and the end, of all evil”), down to rare shared vocabulary (aïdios, “eternal,” of God’s power at Romans 1:20 and Wisdom 7:26; the “without excuse” of Romans 1:20 answering Wisdom 13:8). Paul’s potter who from one lump makes vessels “unto honour” and “unto dishonour” at Romans 9:21 echoes Wisdom 15:7, and his rhetorical questions on the inscrutable sovereignty of God reprise Wisdom’s manner. The armor of God at Ephesians 6:11–17 — breastplate of righteousness, helmet of salvation — reworks the divine warrior of Wisdom 5:17–20 (itself drawn from Isaiah 59:17). To these the standard lists add “who hath known the mind of the Lord?” (Romans 11:34; 1 Corinthians 2:16) ≈ Wisdom 9:13, and the earthly tent that “weighs down” the soul (2 Corinthians 5:1–4) ≈ Wisdom 9:15 — a set that comfortably reaches Marshall’s “about seven.” This is not a Catholic apologist’s stretch: Bruce Metzger concluded there is “little doubt” Paul had “made a close study” of Wisdom, and Francis Watson judges that the cumulative force of the parallels rules out coincidence.²

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The tally, and the acquaintance it evidences. Paul knew the Wisdom of Solomon well — well enough to structure the opening argument of Romans around it — and drew on it more than on any other deuterocanonical book. As evidence that the apostolic writers knew and used the disputed books, the point is good, and Wisdom is its strongest single case. So far Marshall is right, and the maximal Protestant claim that the apostles never even allude to these books is refuted by Romans 1 alone.²

What overstates. The leap from the count to canonicity — from “quotes it about seven times” to “considered Wisdom part of his Bible” — which is where the argument is actually asked to do its work. Three joints give way.

1. An allusion is not a citation as Scripture — and a tally of allusions is not a stronger citation. Paul nowhere introduces the Wisdom of Solomon with “it is written” (gégraptai), “the Scripture saith,” or “that it might be fulfilled” — the apparatus he lavishes on Isaiah, the Psalms, and the Law scores of times. The Romans 1 and Romans 9 parallels are the reverse of formal quotation: Paul absorbs Wisdom’s language into his own argument, and in both places turns it against Wisdom’s own point — where Wisdom uses the idolatry-indictment to divide righteous Jew from idolatrous Gentile, Paul deploys it to level the two under one verdict (“there is no difference”). That is the handling of a familiar text a writer argues with, not the citation of an oracle he defers to. “Known and used” and “received as canonical Scripture” are different claims, and multiplying instances of the first does not convert it into the second: seven unmarked echoes are seven unmarked echoes, not one citation-as-Scripture. The minimal scholarly reading grants exactly this — the deuterocanon is demonstrably alluded to, yet never quoted as Scripture anywhere in the New Testament.³

2. Paul’s own practice sinks the inference. The same apostle quotes the pagan poets Aratus (“for we are also his offspring,” Acts 17:28), Epimenides (“the Cretians are alway liars,” Titus 1:12), and Menander (“evil communications corrupt good manners,” 1 Corinthians 15:33) — and these are closer to formal quotation than anything he does with Wisdom: he cites them by their actual words and even calls Epimenides “a prophet of their own.” If “Paul draws on it, therefore Paul held it as Scripture” were valid, it would enroll Aratus and Menander in Paul’s Bible before it enrolled Wisdom — a result no one accepts. By the same rule Jude 14–15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 by name and as prophecy without canonizing it. Being drawn upon — even quoted as prophecy — does not make a book Scripture; the argument’s own logic, run consistently, proves far too much.⁴

3. Wisdom’s real case for canonicity lies elsewhere — and does not need the tally. The argument is not merely weak; it is redundant. Of all the deuterocanonical books, the Wisdom of Solomon has the strongest early reception: it stands in the great Septuagint codices the church read, the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170) lists it among the received books, and a long succession of Fathers cite it under Scripture-formulae — Methodius, Ambrose, John Cassian (“Scripture itself testifies”), even John of Damascus, who keeps the Hebrew canon yet quotes Wisdom as “the divine Scripture,” and the African councils that enumerate it. That continuous reception, not a count of Pauline echoes, is what an honest case for Wisdom’s canonicity rests on. So the steelman of the interpretation Marshall serves — “Wisdom is Scripture” — is a real and well-supported reading; but its support is the timeline’s reception-history, and the Pauline-tally prop he leans on is the weakest leg of it. (What the tally genuinely secures is the narrower, mutual point: Wisdom was known and valued in the apostolic church — evidence of reception, not of a canon-verdict by Paul.)⁵

The framing claim — “Luther threw it out … you won’t find it in a King James” — is mistaken. In the same passage Marshall accounts for Wisdom’s absence from Protestant Bibles by saying “Martin Luther threw it out, so you won’t find it in a King James or a Lutheran Bible.” Both halves are false as stated. Luther did not “throw out” Wisdom: his 1534 German Bible contains it, gathered with the other disputed books into a separate section headed “Apocrypha … not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet … profitable and good to read” — demotion and relocation, not excision. Nor is Wisdom missing from “a King James”: the 1611 Authorized Version included the Apocrypha, Wisdom among the fourteen books printed between the Testaments, and it stood in the King James and Lutheran Bibles for centuries; the books left common Protestant printings only in the nineteenth century (the British and Foreign Bible Society’s 1826 resolution). So Wisdom’s absence from a modern Protestant Bible is a much later story than “Luther threw it out.” (Whether Luther “removed” the deuterocanon at all is weighed on the Luther-removed page; weak.)⁶

Assessment

Weak — for the canonicity inference; the allusions themselves are sound. That Paul knew the Wisdom of Solomon closely and drew on it “about seven times” is true and granted across confessions — Metzger’s “close study,” with Romans 1 ≈ Wisdom 13–14 the textbook case — and it refutes the stronger Protestant claim that the apostles never echo these books. But the conclusion the tally is enlisted to carry — that Paul thereby “considered Wisdom as part of his Bible” — does not hold on its best case. An unmarked allusion is not a citation with a Scripture-formula, and a count of unmarked allusions is not a stronger one; Paul never introduces Wisdom with “it is written” and in Romans argues against its point; and by the argument’s own logic Paul’s more direct quotation of the pagan poets Aratus, Epimenides, and Menander — and Jude’s naming of 1 Enoch as prophecy — would canonize them too. What survives is the true, modest residue this timeline traces: Wisdom was known, valued, and used in the apostolic church — strong evidence of reception, not of a canon-verdict by Paul. And the interpretation the argument serves — that Wisdom is canonical Scripture — is itself well-grounded, but on the book’s continuous reception (Septuagint, Muratorian, the Fathers), not on the Pauline tally, which is the weakest leg of its case. The exact twin, for a different book, of the Hebrews 11:35 / 2 Maccabees argument, landing in the same graded place. (Flag on the proponent the slide from “quotes … about seven times” (really: alludes, never with a Scripture-formula) to “considered Wisdom as part of his Bible,” and the mistaken “Luther threw it out … you won’t find it in a King James.”)

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