Jesus may not indeed have said these things concerning Solomon, but the probability that he did say something of the kind is suggested by the adroit mistranslations. The same puritanical spirit, the same prejudice against human wisdom and love of beauty, prevailed even more when the Gospels were written. The Jahvist jealousy of the wisdom of the world which in a Targum added to Jeremiah ix. 23 a fling at Solomon,--"Let not Solomon the Son of David, the Wise Man, glory in his Wisdom,"--screamed on in Christian anathemas on science, and laudations of the silly. (For "silly" is of pious derivation, from German selig--blessed.) Solomon had not been named in any canonical scripture for centuries, and even in apocryphal "Wisdom" (Ecclesiasticus) he appears as if a brilliant but fallen Lucifer. The cult of Solomon continued no doubt, in a sense, among the Sadducees (respectfully treated, by the way, by Jesus), but they were comparatively few, and like the rationalists of the English Church, cautious about outside heresies. It was probably characteristic that their name is derived from Solomon's priest, Zadok, instead of from Solomon himself. As for the Gentile Queen, she is not named in the Bible after the record of her visit to Solomon until the homage of Jesus was given her. It appears, therefore, very unlikely that such homage and the unqualified tributes to Solomon, would have been put into the mouth of Jesus. But why, it may be asked, were not these tributes suppressed? There is in one case a recognition of a Gentile lady which would recommend the text to the writer of Luke, and in the other a lesson against luxury which would recommend this to all believers. At any rate, whatever may have been the suppressions, and no doubt there were many, two of the Gospels have preserved these sentences, which, so far as the glorious "idolator" is concerned, neither of them would have invented. There are the words; somebody uttered them; and the question arises, who was that daring man who broke the severe silence or reservations of centuries and did honour to the king who built shrines to gods and goddesses? [52] As Solomon said, "A man is proved by what he praises." That Jesus did appreciate the greatness of the Solomonic literature is not a matter of conjecture. The sayings ascribed to him in the Gospels--apart from Pauline importations and quotations from Jahvist scriptures--are largely pervaded by the spirit and even by the phraseology of the Solomonic books. Remembering that the phrases "kingdom of heaven," "kingdom of God," are post-resurrectional, and that Jesus could not, unless by miraculous foresight, use those phrases for any external dominion connected with himself, there is reason to believe that his conception was of a sway of Wisdom, and that Wisdom was to him the Saviour, as to Jesus Ben Sira, her realm "within," her leaven hid in the world, her advance without observation.