Bible

The Bible is a canonical collection of texts sacred in Christianity.

• The first part of all Christian Bibles is the Old Testament, which contains, at minimum, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible divided into thirty-nine books and ordered differently from the Hebrew Bible.
• The second part of the Christian Bible is the New Testament, containing twenty-seven books originally written in Koine Greek, which discuss the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christianity. The New Testament is divided into the four Canonical gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one Epistles or didactic letters, and the Book of Revelation.

Bellairs Corpus

• Mrs. Crapple’s son used to break into uncontrollable laughter during the reading of the Last Gospel (Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies; 23).
  • The Last Gospel is the passage from the Gospel according to Saint John in chapter 1, verses 1 to 14 inclusive, where Jesus is described as the Logos. It is so named because it is part of the concluding rite of the Traditional Latin Mass of the Roman Rite.
• The Question Box Moderator consults the book and finds the example of the living rosary discovered by Purina Sansfoy is not a sign that the End is coming (Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies, 44).
• During Vatican III, a debate on whether the Baltimore Catechism was a possible third source of Revelation occurred (Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies, 93).

Inspiration

Norbert Geier, Chairman of the English Department during Bellairs's his second year at the College of Saint Teresa, remembers Bellairs telling him how he and another Notre Dame student had a hilarious time with some passages in the Bible.

"The passages amused them greatly, and when they met, one of the other would simply say the name of the book of the Bible, and the chapter and verse numbers, sending them both into paroxysms of laughter. The other students around would be mystified by these antics; they saw nothing funny in the expression 'Deuteronomy 25:11-12.'  John showed me this passage in the Bible and I too found it amusing."

"When two men are fighting and the wife of one of them intervenes to drag her husband clear of his opponent, if she puts out her hand and catches hold of the man by genitals, you must cut off her hand and show no mercy."