from The Church of the Comic Spirit

What Father Alazon Lustlieb discoveredon April 1, 1978, in that hallowed cave overlooking Bear Lake, was a set of twelve ancient sheepskin Scrolls, neatly arranged within the folds of what he later described to his four disciples as “a very old briefcase.” When we pressed him for an estimate of the age of that briefcase, he judged it to be four thousand years old, “give or take fifty years.” He conceded that this was an estimate, and that the angel Michelle had provided him no information about the history of the documents. He added that the probable reason for her silence on this question was that, in order to preserve the aura of mystery with which divine manifestations are always attended, angels do not reveal the minor details of their revelations to prophets.

The briefcase, he emphasized, had never been opened. He verified this opinion by citing the expert testimony of a certified Beverly Hills locksmith (he could not remember her name). Once she had disengaged the rusty clasp, Father Lustlieb said, he paid her, quietly left the back room of her establishment (secrecy, he emphasized, was extremely important), went back to his uncle’s mansion, stole unobserved into the wine cellar (secrecy again being the motive), opened the briefcase, and found a trove of twelve ancient sheepskin Scrolls, all of them perfectly preserved. Each scroll was secured with a royal blue waxen seal, on which was stamped a single Ur-Hebrew word, aleph $ taw, for which there is no English equivalent. Each seal was also stamped with a tiny Ur-Hebrew number, indicating, he surmised, the order in which the Scrolls were to be translated and positioned within the finished text.

What follows in the main body of this volume are Father Lustlieb’s translations of those twelve sacred Scrolls, including the titles, which were present in the original.