Oy, what a fool I am! I have not yet told you the most important thing about the apostle Paul: his message. As a fresh convert and inspired thinker, Paul of Damascus brought to Christianity a whole new vision: the vision of biblical religion without mandatory circumcision. "If the heart of an uncircumcised Gentile is right with the Lord," said Paul, "why should anyone have to mess with a born-again fellow's penis?" This new revelation (or "New Dispensation" as it is called in theological seminaries) came just in the nick of time, when it seemed as if Christianity might—oops, I almost said "peter out!"—when it seemed as if Christianity might perish from the Earth.

The word had spread among Gentiles concerning those Eight Steps to Peace with God. The original apostles were still preaching, off and on, but without new converts, on account of steps 5 through 8. That was tough on the morale of Simon Peter especially. Saint Peter wanted nothing more than to establish a popular base of manly guys on which to build a truly masculine organisation like the Catholic Church. But when it came time for the altar call, you could build a fire under the butts of the unsaved guys. They just wouldn't budge. Simon Peter's congregations in first-century Judaea resembled an Orthodox congregation in 20th-century Russia: rows and rows of unsmiling, moustachioed ladies in babushkas, and not a man in sight. Except, of course, Peter.

Paul's strategy changed all of that. Paul's "Gospel of the Uncircumcision" overcame the resistance of Gentile men to Christian salvation (Rom. 2:25-7).

Whenever the apostle Paul got going on the touchy subject of the uncircumcised Christian penis – which is to say, on almost every day of his born-again adult life – he became quite the passionate orator. I've never met a man more obsessed with the male foreskin than Paul was – except maybe Joshua, who once made a mountain of them, or King David, who gave his bride, as a wedding gift, 200 foreskins that he personally sliced from the corpses of dead Philistines. People could not get Paul to talk or write about anything except the Christian penis controversy that was tearing apart the first-century Church (Titus 1:10-11).

With Saint Paul's sermons, it was always "Jesus, yes, but without circumcision." "Marital abstinence, yes, and no circumcision." "Effeminate men, no, and no circumcision." "Slaves obey your masters even unto circumcision." "Shun prostitutes, yes, and no circumcision." "Eternal salvation, and no circumcision." Every sermon. Every epistle. "The Gospel of the Uncircumcision was committed unto me," wrote Paul (weeping as he wrote), "just as the Gospel of the Circumcision was given unto Peter" (Gal. 2:7).

In the course of his 25-year ministry, Saint Paul circumcised only one boy with his own hands, a Greek youth of Lystra, named Timotheus (Acts 16:1-4); but that was a unique case: Paul had a special affection for Timotheus, having met him on the rebound right after Barnabas ditched Paul to travel with Simon Peter's son, John Mark (Acts 15:35-40). But when Paul writes of "Timotheus, who is my beloved" (1 Cor. 4:17), or of "Timothy, my dearly beloved" (2 Tim. 1:2), he refers to the special father-son, surgeon-patient, bond that Paul felt for Timothy after performing the bris; I doubt that the two men ever got physical. In fact, I once heard Timothy say that, whenever he suffered an involuntary erection, to get rid of it he simply thought of the apostle Paul, which would make him go limp, instantly, almost like magic (which I totally believe, because Saint Paul once crossed even my own mind at exactly the wrong moment, when I was with a girl named Lola, and that one fleeting thought was such a downer that it spoiled the rest of the evening).

When speaking or writing to anyone except his beloved Timothy, Saint Paul's message was always the same: "Guys, you don't have to be circumcised to love Jesus!" and "Gals, your guy no longer has to lose his foreskin to save his soul!" (2 Cor. 2:4, Php. 3:18).

I'll say this, the strategy worked: Saint Paul's veto on those last four steps of the Eight Steps to Peace with God was a stroke of marketing genius not matched by any human society until March 1952, when the Lorillard Tobacco Company introduced its Kent^® cigarette with the new Micronite^® filter, which was said to remove seven times more tar and nicotine than any other brand. But even that example pales in comparison, because Paul's "Gospel of the Uncircumcision" truly did remove sin, while Kent's "Micronite filter" was made of asbestos, and was not all that helpful to a lung in need of salvation.

– L.