Now when the apostles Barnabas and Paul saw what was happening, they tore off their clothing and rushed into the crowd, shouting, "Why are you doing these things? Behold! we too are human, men of like passions with you!" (Acts 14:14, KJV).

Blame it on the heat of the moment, but "men of like passions with you" was not the best choice of words when addressing a mob of sex-crazed Lycaonian sodomites – which is also why that particular phrasing has been re-worked in some recent English translations.

It was Barnabas alone, not Paul, who got totally naked for the crowd and shouted that he was a man of Greek-like passions. (Paul dropped his toga to his portly navel, and let it go at that.) But Barnabas stood there in the altogether, giving them the full monty because he wished to reassure the boys of Lystra that he was only a human named Barnabas, and not a god named Zeus.

The Lycaonian Greeks were not convinced. For one thing, the good people of Lystra had been taught that their Greek heavenly Father, Zeus, has a literal penis; and that Zeus uses his organ for his own pleasure with whoever tickles his fancy, whether male or female, young or old, Christian, Jew, or Greek – not sparing even his own elderly sister, Hera. Another reason is that Barnabas, for a missionary, was surprisingly well hung; and when he dropped his toga to the pavement – hoping thereby to prove he was only a mortal man and no god – the priest of Zeus ran forward and put a wreath over Barnabas's head, and said to the crowd, "Yes, it's Him, all right!"

As a result, the apostles could hardly keep the crowd from making sacrifices to them, and then some Jews from Antioch and Iconium spoke, and they persuaded the crowd to stone Paul instead of worshiping him, and so they stoned him, and then they dragged him outside the city, and they left him for dead, and the Christian believers gathered around him, and he got up, and he went back into the city of Lystra, and then he and Barnabas left for Derbe the next day. (Acts 14:16-18)

(Sorry about all of those conjunctions, they're in my copytext, Greek kai, "and," which is the holy Ghost's favourite nervous verbal tick when he attempts to write in Greek.)

Paul's body the next day was one solid bruise from head to shin. (A few of those Lycaonian boys had the throwing arm of a pro baseball pitcher.) Paul looked, truly, as if he had been run over by a cattle stampede. Had there been larger rocks outside the Lystra gate that day, instead of those golfball-sized pebbles, he'd have been a dead man. I almost felt sorry for him. But the Lord was unrepentant. The Lord just shrugged it off as a series of rapid-fire bumps on Paul's learning curve. And indeed, Paul learned his lesson: never again did he perform a miracle without saying "in the name of the Father" or "in the name of Jesus."

The Lord also punished Barnabas, not by stoning, but in another way, until well past midnight. He then punished the priest of Zeus who punished Barnabas.

Beelzebub has a joke about that. According to Beelzebub, the Lycaonian priest of Zeus was a randy old Norwegian, a burly Viking named Thor, after the god of Valhalla. In the morning, Thor rolled over in bed and whispered in Barnabas's ear, "I have something to tell you. I'm Thor."

And Barnabas said, "You're thore!"

– L.