“Socrates, Plato, Aga you know, Eryxima-whatever, and all them others at the booze party …” advanced a muscular individual in army trousers.

Dr. Westway didn’t comment on the answer before continuing, “Who wrote the Bible?”

I was the only one to raise my palms towards the sky.

“Yes?”

“God.” I rejoiced.

“God?”

“How do you like to be called?”

“Kate.”

“Kate. Good. Can you start reading Genesis to us. I hope you’ll be using the Oxford revised standard version I put on your reading list.” He squinted at the minuscule pocket Bible on my desk.

Having read in the bulletin that Dr. Westway held a Doctorate in Theology from Princeton, I assumed he would like a fervent recitation. My goodwill was short-lived. Dr. Westway stopped me constantly, asked me to go back to different passages until I was confused and had to refer back to the pages of my Bible. The thinness of its pages didn’t allow vigorous manipulation, and I lost the corners of some in my haste.

Vegetation concerned him particularly.

I read, “Let the earth cause grass to shoot forth, vegetation bearing seed …”

“Stop! What day was that on?”

“And there came to be evening, morning, and a third day, sir.”

“What day was man made on?”

“The sixth.”

Dr. Westway had me proceed to the second chapter, where I read, “Now there was yet no bush of the field found in the earth and no vegetation of the field.”

“Then what happened?”

“God makes man out of dust, or clay, or whatever,” boasted the boy in army trousers, hugging himself as if to make sure he was now made out of muscle.

“So if I get this right, in the first version, vegetation precedes man. In the second version, man precedes vegetation. Hm. Did God blunder?”

How dare he postulate such blasphemy. Surely, the confusion must be attributed to the translations from Hebrew to Latin, from old English to modern. I said something to this effect.

“Who else besides me reads Hebrew around here?” asked Dr. Westway.

One student, so gaunt that the Coca-Cola glasses he wore across his face seemed a prank of cruelty, had the force to raise a long finger. The student only pretended to read. I watched his eyes pivoting in the wrong direction, from east to west.

“Is the contradiction there?”

“Yes, it is.”

For the next several minutes, Dr. Westway referred to the creation of the earth as the “seven day myth” opposed to the “Adam and Eve myth”. I was dumbfounded. Sacrilege was not what I had expected from a college called Trinity. Dr. Westway lectured on the “hodgepodge” of authors of this “bestseller”, making jokes about the copyright had the “book” been written today, as though Jehovah and Job were mere “characters”.

“This is not a book!” I snapped.

There were a few snorts of accord.

“What is it then?” Dr. Westway asked me.

I stood up to say, “Jehovah God is the heavenly author of this sacred library of six and sixty testimonies.”