Having drawn the longer straw, Simon Peter began the debate by giving Paul a verbal drubbing. Peter took his pro-circumcision arguments directly from the holy Bible (so if my transcript of his argument is boring, don't blame me, blame his copytext):

PETER: First, pardon me for stating the obvious to my pro-choice opponent: Christians have no line-item veto power over those laws that God has said are for "all generations." We cannot keep "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and erase "Thou shalt be circumcised."

PAUL: Who's to say?

PETER: Jesus!

PAUL: Jesus would never say that.

PETER: Oh, yeah? Try this: Matthew 5:17 [Peter quoted the text]. Or this: Luke 16:17. [Peter quoted the text].

Paul was getting creamed.

PAUL: Well, I guess Jesus must've changed his mind, then, because when Jesus beamed me up to the Third Heaven he told me just the opposite.

PETER: Then you must've been dreaming.

PAUL (with a sweep of his arm, gesturing toward his followers): But these brothers in Christ are now fully grown, well past eight days old.

PETER (fiercely): And must they, therefore, be cowards? When our father Abraham went under the razor – at the Lord's command – was he past eight days old? Hmm, let me think. Oh, yes! Now I remember, Genesis 17:24: the Scripture teaches us that Abraham, when he got circumcised, was already ninety-nine f**king years old!"

Simon Peter pounded his fist on the table for emphasis. Paul clapped his hands over his ears, but it was too late, he heard every word.

(To my readers: I beg your pardon, Simon Peter had a salty tongue, one that no man could tame [James 3:8]. Hereafter, I shall soften his harshest adjectives.)

PETER (thundering now): And what's more, father Abraham did it to himself! And how did our father Abraham do it? Let's see what Scripture says. Oh, yes, here we go: he sawed the thing off with a piece of frigging flint!

PAUL: When I went with our Lord Jesus Christ up to the Third Heaven, I was –

PETER: – dreaming! You were dreaming!

You could see that Paul, who was a proud man, and a scholar, and a citizen of Rome though a Jew, did not like to be contradicted by a provincial fisherman. Turning to his followers, he made a biting comment that would turn up later, verbatim, in the book of Galatians: "If I were to preach Circumcision, would I still be getting persecuted like this? ... As for these, these agitators, I wish they would be more thorough – and just castrate themselves!" Ha, ha, ha! (Gal. 5:11-12).

The men of the Gospel of the Uncircumcision roared with laughter. Those on the other side of the room did not. In fact, one of the circumcised Jewish Christians was outraged by Saint Paul's sarcasm. There was a scuffle.

SHOUTING MAN: Put your meat on the table, you [Aramaic expletive]!"

VOICE IN THE CROWD: He's got a knife!

The fellow lunged across the table towards Paul.

But the man was drunk, and quickly restrained. Two fellow Christians of the Gospel of the Circumcision carried him outside, where he fell asleep. And he later apologised.

At this point, Saint Peter's whole argument started to unravel. Turning from Scripture, he digressed into a tedious disquisition on the aesthetic advantages: a circumcised penis, he opined, simply looks better.

Saint Peter was not on solid ground here. His notion of what an uncircumcised penis looks like came from Rome's marble statuary, and from the chalk-drawings in Roman latrines. He had never actually seen one himself. Nor did he have available to him such homely anatomical comparisons for an uncircumcised penis as "seaworm" or "baby aardvark's nose" or "pink banana slug." Moreover, his argument was hard to follow. Peter seemed to imply that circumcised Christian lads have a better chance of scoring with chicks, which is not what he intended to imply. The death knell came when he let slip that his authority for this whole issue derived from a Samaritan prostitute named "Jezebel," who had seen plenty of both kinds, and preferred the Jewish look over the Gentile – which did not, however, strengthen the overall success of Simon Peter's pro-circumcision, anti-pro-choice argument.

Now that Peter seemed to have run out of Scriptural ammunition, Paul went on the offensive for the pro-choice, pro-foreskin crowd. He began firing off Bible verses of his own. He cited the prophet Jeremiah – "O, how long wilt thou cut thyself? Put up thyself into thy sheath!" – adding snidely, "On second thought, let's not! Hey, brothers, if anyone shoved Simon Peter up a sheath, he'd probably grow longer! Ha, ha, ha!" (Jeremiah. 47:5-6).

The entire hall thundered with the laughter of the party of the Gospel of the Uncircumcision.

Peter waited for them to calm down: "Yeah, well, keep on talking, Paul, and talk fast. Because when we circumcise your dork-head church members, they're gonna lose their ears!"

As the debate became more heated, both apostles said things that they later regretted and which are best left unreported.

Paul called for the question. A vote was taken. The votes were counted. The Gospel of the Uncircumcision won handily. And that is why, to this very day, male converts to Christianity are not obliged to be circumcised before receiving the gift of eternal life (although, if your foreskin has already been removed for some other reason than Christian faith, neither are you under any obligation to have it surgically restored).

– L.