DEMOPOLIS — For this month’s lunch at the library program, the Rev. Richard Losch made the afternoon a chance to share with people about his most recent work, “All the People in the Bible.”

Losch recently retired from St. James Church in Livingston and is the priest-in-charge at St. Paul’s Church in Greensboro. But Losch did not begin his life of faith in the South.

Losch moved to the South from Boston, Mass. where he attended Berkley Divinity School at Yale.

His talk was a part of a program sponsored by the Friends of the Library. His other works include “The Uttermost Part of the Earth,” and “The Many Faces of Faith.”

Losch said he was first moved to compile a book after a friend suggested he put together many of the articles he had written over the years in a newsletter. Soon the idea came to fruition and he has published two more books dealing with theology and specifically the Bible.

In his remarks Tuesday, Losch focused on the many people in the Bible who are often not explored. In his most recent work, there are approximately 3,000 people named from the Bible with more than 600 of those people with biographies.

In writing the work, Losch said he tried to look that people differently than they are usually portrayed, by setting them back in the context of their day and what other corroborating literature said about them.

“One of the things that validates the Bible for me is that for Jewish and Christianity, their scriptures include a history of the religion,” Losch said.

Losch went on to say the Bible as a historical text is different than a kind of mythology, because its heroes are presented with both their good and bad aspects. The subtitle of his work is an A-Z guide to the saints, scoundrels and other characters in scriptures. In this case, he said, there are often more scoundrels than saints.

“The Bible presents its heroes with all of their warts,” Losch said.

For Losch, these “warts” are a means for people to read the texts with more believability. Just a few of the characters he discussed Tuesday include Cain and Abel, King Herod and Pontius Pilate.