Word: apocrypha
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...PROPHET, by Sholem Asch (343 pp.; Putnam; $4) is the work of an expert at making a good thing out of the Good Book. As the high priest of the Neo-Apocrypha or Bible-improvement school of writing, Sholem Asch, 75, has racked up sales of more than 1,000,000 by gilding such subjects as the lives of Christ (The Nazarene), St. Paul (The Apostle), Mary and Moses. This time Asch has raided the Bible for the story of the second Isaiah, who roused the Jews out of their Babylonian captivity.* The book's religious message is swaddled...
...JUDITH AND HOLOFERNES, by the 15th century Paduan, ANDREA MANTEGNA, treats a bloody drama with chill grace. (The story, told in a book of the Apocrypha: Nebuchadnezzar sent an army against Bethulia under Captain Holofernes, who laid siege to the city. Judith, a lovely, pious and patriotic widow of Bethulia, made her way into Holofernes' camp, tent, and affections. After three days' dalliance she caught him napping, removed his head, and stole back to town with her trophy. Soon afterwards the siege was lifted.) Mantegna's panel was probably one of a series on the theme...
Last week Manhattan concertgoers heard their first Vivaldi opera, performed by Thomas Scherman, his Little Orchestra (TIME, April 30, 1951) and soloists. Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans, based on the story of Judith and Holofernes in the Apocrypha, was a delight to the ear throughout, if a little difficult to imagine as opera...
...Hitler burned the books. "The best reply," said Neuman, "would be to restore some of the great works that have been virtually lost to the Jewish people." He gathered a team of 20 scholars, got a grant from Manhattan's Littauer Foundation, and began translating into English the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha, a series of ancient noncanonical writings closely connected to the Bible...
...read; in fact a legend." Yet there can be little doubt, especially when page after page of Waugh's sky-blue prose goes purple with emotion, that the author intended his legend to be literature-a lovingly wrought story that would take its place in the Christian Apocrypha...