In James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now (Free Press, Sept.), the former Harvard professor looks at the Hebrew Bible through the lenses of both ancient interpreters and modern scientific analysis.

RBL: What sources did you have for the earliest biblical interpreters you draw on, such as the Book of Jubilees?

Kugel: Jews decided midrash was midrash, and they didn’t want any of these earlier sources from before the Current Era. It became even forbidden to copy them and publicly study them. But fortunately there was a group of Jews—the first Christians—who didn’t hold by that, so they translated these books into various languages. After a few generations, many Christians couldn’t read Hebrew, so they translated them into Greek, and from Greek into Ethiopic, Coptic and other languages.

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If he ever loses his day job, Jesuit priest and author James Martin has something to fall back on. He's also now a member of the LAByrinth Theater Company, as a result of serving as theological consultant to the 2005 off-Broadway production of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Martin, associate editor at America magazine and author of My Life with the Saints (Loyola Press, 2006) recounts his theatrical experience in A Jesuit Off-Broadway: Center Stage with Jesus, Judas, and Life's Big Questions (Loyola, Sept.). The book goes behind the scenes of the production, combining theology, memoir, and reportage. 

The unlikely thespian became involved in theater when he was contacted in 2004 by actor Sam Rockwell, who was preparing to play Judas in the drama written by Stephen Adly Guirgis, who pens the book's foreword.

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