Have you read the Wisdom of Solomon.

Xeno.of.athens

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The Wisdom of Solomon starts this way
The Wisdom of Solomon 1
The Search for Justice
1 Love justice, you rulers of the world. Set your minds sincerely on the Lord, and look for him with all honesty. 2 Those who do not try to test him will find him; he will show himself to those who trust him. 3 Dishonest thoughts separate people from God, and if we are foolish enough to test him, his power will put us to shame. 4 Wisdom will never be at home with anyone who is deceitful or a slave of sin. 5 Everyone who is holy has learned to stay away from deceitful people. He will not stay around when foolish thoughts are being expressed; he will not feel comfortable when injustice is done.​
 

The Liturgist

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The Wisdom of Solomon starts this way
The Wisdom of Solomon 1
The Search for Justice
1 Love justice, you rulers of the world. Set your minds sincerely on the Lord, and look for him with all honesty. 2 Those who do not try to test him will find him; he will show himself to those who trust him. 3 Dishonest thoughts separate people from God, and if we are foolish enough to test him, his power will put us to shame. 4 Wisdom will never be at home with anyone who is deceitful or a slave of sin. 5 Everyone who is holy has learned to stay away from deceitful people. He will not stay around when foolish thoughts are being expressed; he will not feel comfortable when injustice is done.​

Yes, and I love it. Especially Chapter 2, which is pure Christological prophecy.

Fun fact: any complete copy of the KJV will include it and the rest of the commonly used Deuterocanonical books, like Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), the books of the Maccabees, Tobit, Baruch, Judith and so on, because the Church of England and most other Anglican churches read these books at Morning Prayer and Evensong. The Episcopal Church USA and ACNa churches using the 1979 BCP reads Sirach (the chapter “Honor a physician”) on the Feast of St. Luke.
 
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Clare73

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Yes, and I love it. Especially Chapter 2, which is pure Christological prophecy.

Fun fact: any complete copy of the KJV will include it and the rest of the commonly used Deuterocanonical books, like Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), the books of the Maccabees, Tobit, Baruch, Judith and so on, because the Church of England and most other Anglican churches read these books at Morning Prayer and Evensong. The Episcopal Church USA and ACNa churches using the 1979 BCP reads Sirach (the chapter “Honor a physician”) on the Feast of St. Luke.
It's the one book of the Apocrypha that I think is Scripture.
 
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The Liturgist

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It's the one book of the Apocrypha that I think is Scripture.

The miraculous thing about the Wisdom of Solomon is that the currently extant Greek text dates from about 60-70 years before the Birth of Christ.

I and many others believe the book contains inspired sayings of King Solomon which like much Jewish tradition only began to be written down during the era in whixh Aramaic and Greek were the vernacular languages of the Jews and Hebrew had become a liturgical language, like Coptic, Latin, Ge’ez, Classical Armenian, and Church Slavonic are today (fortunately, Syriac and other Aramaic dialects are used in the vernacular by most members of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, and among the Syriac Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and some Aramaic speaking Jewish communities, there may be 45,000 additional Aramaic speakers, and as of 2000, the last census before most Mandaeans fled Iraq due to the war, there were 60,000 Aramaic speaking Mandaeans, an ethno-religious group whose faith revolves around John the Baptist and Baptism, but is also Gnostic, anti-Semitic (or rather anti-Jewish, because the Mandaeans are Mesopotamian Semites speaking a Semitic language) and regards our Lord as a false Messiah. Amusingly one of their scriptures tries to cast Jesus in a bad light but fails and actually the quotes falsely attributed to him make Him look good, so I find it ironic that even attempts to libel our Lord have a tendency to fail. This all being said, Mandaeans often seek refuge in Christian churches and lately have been backpeddling on the doctrine of our Lord as a false messiah, and I pray we will see a Mandaean Christian Church in our lifetime, probably as part of the Church of the East, the Syriac Orthodox Church, or the Antiochian Orthodox Church as these have the most Aramaic speakers (with the Assyrians speaking the dialect closest to Mandaic). The Chaldean Catholics were at one time part of the Church of the East, and are one of the seven or so Assyrian tribes, but they broke with the rest of the Assyrian church in part because they primarily speak Arabic.

On the subject of Gnosticism by the way, I would prefer it if people reserved the use of the term Apocrypha for works like The Gospel of Truth or the Pistis Sophia or the Tripartite Tractate, which are not accepted by any Nicene Christian churches as canonical scripture. I think now, in recognition of the fact that the most persecuted Christian churches, including the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox (in particular the Ethiopians and Eritreans, who use books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees), in addition to Anglicans, Roman Catholics and even John Calvin, who regarded Baruch as proto-canon, used deuterocanonical books, and some major Christian figures including Martin Luther and St. Athanasius doubted the canonicity of Esther, and Martin Luther furthermore personally did not regard James, Jude, Hebrews or Revelation as worthy of canonical status, we should use the term deuterocanonical to refer to books which are accepted in some churches but not in all of them, and use the term apocrypha to refer only to those books which are universally rejected for false doctrine.

By the way, discovering the true nature of the apocryphal psuedepigraphical “gospels” was one of the great disappointments of my life, because I had no idea how wacky the heresy was which produced them (I thought Gnostics were just ancient Christians with some unusual ideas, just as I naively thought Christian Science was just another mainstream Protestant denomination and not a dangerous, heretical cult responsible for the death of many children and, due to a deep-seated mistrust of doctors even after he stopped attending, Jim Henson, among other victims). So I naively thought those works were more stories about the life of Jesus, which St. John tantalizingly alludes to in the conclusion of his gospel, but most of them either do not feature our Lord or are distortions of existing accounts from canonical scripture. There is a clear lack of inspiration.

In contrast, the deuterocanonical books, even the more extreme examples used by the Ethiopians, strike me as having an inspired quality, and this is especially the case in books like the Wisdom of Solomon. I also love Tobit, Sirach, Baruch, which I recently reread, and the extended versions of Daniel and Esther (the Septuagint version of Esther strikes me as being a much more Christian, spiritual story, whereas the Masoretic version, which lacks the strong element of prayer in the Septuagint version, comes across as being more of an example of Jewish epic literature, which is why I expect Luther wanted to delete it; he did not see a Christian message in the Masoretic version and did not trust the Septuagint version for his own reasons, which I suspect were influenced by the misguided approach of St. Jerome, who believed that the Hebrew and Aramaic texts were always more reliable than the Septuagint, and thus translated the Vulgate from them, an approach which the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Qumran Caves has proven to be misguided, since we now have numerous Hebrew fragments which correspond with the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic as well as fragments of 1 Enoch and other works previously deemed by many to be spurious.
 
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bèlla

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The first time I read it was during my childhood. I liked Sirach and Ecclesiastes too. My aunt impressed the importance of wisdom and I sought it in prayer. She introduced me to spiritual warfare and deepened my understanding of ministry. I wouldn’t be where I am without her guidance and grace. He answered my prayer many times over.
 
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The Liturgist

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The first time I read it was during my childhood. I liked Sirach and Ecclesiastes too. My aunt impressed the importance of wisdom and I sought it in prayer. She introduced me to spiritual warfare and deepened my understanding of ministry. I wouldn’t be where I am without her guidance and grace. He answered my prayer many times over.

Note that Ecclesiastes js regarded as protocanonical, whereas Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, and Wisdom, or the Wisdom of Solomon, are regarded as deuterocanonical, except in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which does not make a distinction.
 
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Clare73

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Xeno.of.athens

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Oh, darn!

I think it's really Sirach that I am talking about.
Sorry, Liturgist.

It's been some decades since I decided, and I think I've confused them now.
May I commend The Wisdom of Solomon to you?
It is shorter than Sirach yet very profound.
 
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