Friday, March 22, 2024

Lee Martin McDonald on the Muratorian Fragment Listing the Wisdom of Solomon in a New Testament List

  

The Muratorian Fragment oddly includes the Wisdom of Solomon, an OT apocryphal and pseudonymous writing, in a New Testament list (lines 69-70). This is highly unusual and has only parallels in the fourth century as we see in Eusebius who lists Irenaeus’ Christian scripture collection which also includes Wisdom of Solomon (Hist. eccl. 5.8-1-8; ca. 325-330). We see the same later in Epiphanius (Pan. 76.5; fl. ca. 375-403). . . . A more likely explanation for this anomaly in the fourth century is that Wisdom of Solomon was a highly prized book, but by that time some church fathers knew that the Jews had excluded it from the HB canon and then some Christians had also excluded it from their OT canon. Consequently some church fathers included it in their NT. Further, since Wisdom of Solomon is missing in the Jewish canon lists, including in those Christian lists that followed the Jewish canon of Scriptures . . . some church fathers added Wisdom to a NT list. (Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, 2 vols. [London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017], 2:287, 289)