but it is in the Orthodox, Syriac, Ethiopian and Catholic Bibles and it was almost certainly considered to be Scripture among many of what would later become Jewish communities around the Mediterranean in the 1st century. I doubt the Greek speaking and writing early gentile Christians would have known about them or the other Jewish Scriptures if that hadn't been the case.
Wisdom is generally believed to have been written by a Jewish scholar in Alexandria in the 1st century BC though when the Masoretic text was chosen centuries later the choice was made to not include a Hebrew translation of the Greek it was written in. I might respect the right of those in early modern Judaism and much later Protestantism to make the choices they did - Protestants and other Christians, by the way, altered the ordering of the Old Testaments from the different ordering with quite different intents in the Jewish Bible so their Biblical choices differed from those who formed and kept what became modern Judaism, too.
As it is, the Septuagint, which was produced by Jews from the two or so centuries before Jesus was born till, likely, a while after, are as Jewish as any of it. It is certain that for a lot of Jews at the time of Jesus, to put it anachronistically as modern Judaism is a somewhat later development (and no one should read that chronology as conferring lesser legitimacy) the Greek Scriptures WERE THE BIBLE THEY KNEW even in parts of the Middle East as certainly as the King James Versions (and there are a number of those) are to lots of American Protestants. Paul who, as the Jewish New Testament Scholar Amy Levine has pointed out, is the only self-declared Pharisee for whom we have any writings, at all, certainly relied on the Greek version of the only Scriptures around during his time, the Jewish ones, as he was perhaps unwittingly writing what would become the earliest books of the Christian Scriptures. I hold with the idea that Matthew very likely wrote one of if not the actual and now likely lost (in its earliest form) logia compiling at least many of the sayings of Jesus which later formed the basis of the Synoptic Gospels, especially Matthew. I base my thinking on that to some of the earliest writings about the writing of the New Testament which say Matthew wrote that and later writers translated into Greek from the original "Hebrew" (I think they might have meant Aramaic but it's possible a literate Jew living near Jerusalem might have written Hebrew) and that that includes what became the Gospel of Matthew when, as in Luke, they relied on earlier logia and sayings and reports.
Other than him it isn't obvious that the other writers of the New Testament would have known any Scripture other than that which they had in Greek. I think the author of James and Hebrews and possibly Mark were likely Jewish as well, though that's far from known. I think that the Greek version of the Old Testament, including the books not chosen for inclusion in the modern Jewish and Protestant canons, are as legitimate as the later ones, including some of the best evidence of the contemporary Jewish understandings of the Hebrew Scripture that those Jewish scholars translated. Even the texts that you are always hearing are later "Christian forgeries" to make them seem more predictive of Jesus. I doubt that last accusation which is a later polemic not in earlier evidence.
I was raised a Catholic and when I got round to studying something about the history of all of those various Bibles, from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish Septuagint* to the Orthodox, Syriac, Catholic, Ethiopian, Masoreic and Protestant Bibles (listed roughly in order of their presumed writing or canons being formed), I figured to try to respect everyone's choices, at least for themselves. I once said that I'd hate to see the book of Wisdom go because a number of really good motets and chants were setting from it. You've got to admit, the Jewish scholar who wrote it wrote a really good text for All Souls Day. I think it's right, too, or I wouldn't have posted it to start with.
* I don't know a lot about how the Samaritan Scriptures differ from the Hebrew or much about their antiquity or if they consider anything about the other Writings that are included in other canons of Scripture but I figure I should mention them as part of the same development. I have read that they maintain many of the other Writings but they're not considered as part of their Scriptural canon which only has the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures represented. At least that's what I've read. I want to respect everyone's honest choices. I agree with Rabbi Heschel. The existence and persistence of religious diversity is an indication that God isn't greatly opposed to it or it would have been made even harder to maintain it. She hasn't even crushed the dishonest and currently politically dangerous dispensationalist heresy out of existence, at least not yet.
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