The story of the apostles sleeping in the Garden of Gethsemene is infamous. “Could you not watch one hour with me,” Christ scorned them. We all sympathize with the apostles, especially exhausted and sleep-deprived Wyoming Catholic College students like the members of the IIT staff. But new scientific studies conducted as part of the juniors’ SCI 302: Scientific Reasoning II course have revealed that one simple trick could have kept the apostles, especially Sts. Peter, James, and John together—and awake on that cold terrible night two millennia ago. According to IIT smoking expert Joe “Big Red” Nemereth, “the apostles wouldn’t have been sleeping if they had been smoking a hookah instead.”
An obvious assertion perhaps, but one that is testable insofar as one can test whether someone can both smoke a hookah and sleep at the same time. According to Joe, it’s high near impossible to do both simultaneously, with both a 99.9% confidence interval that the two are mutually exclusive events obtained from ten Fisher Sign Test experiment trials in a row on students attempting to do both at once failing in their objective and leading him to reject the null hypothesis that the two activities are independent.
“Sts. Peter James and John could have been smoking a hookah instead of sleeping, they could have been playing Foosball, they should have even considered roof-hopping,” adds Joe’s close friend and prefect Andrew Russell. “Any of them would have done the trick of keeping them awake because each of those activities is obviously mutually exclusive with sleeping. However, smoking a hookah also has the partiuclarly beneficial effect of smoothing out their energy/wakefullness distribution by increasing its sigma (σ) value so they’d also be able to stay awake longer after they were done smoking.”
Neither Andrew nor Joe really knows why the Apostles didn’t try any of these simple tricks to stay awake, but experts at IIT believe that Christ may simply have been against the Apostles’ smoking habits. This is clearly evidenced according to one of our scriptural scholars by the fact that St. Peter also did not smoke while he was trying to keep warm at the charcoal fire at the court of the High Priest. Were St. Peter to have behaved like any trypical WCC student, he would have picked up a guitar and pulled out a cigar at this moment. The obvious lack of St. Peter smoking here in the Gospel accounts seems to indicate that Christ simply didn’t want any smoking until the end times as St. John talks in Revelations of the Riders of the Apocylapse and the “fire and smoke and sulphur issuing from their mouths.”
We’re left with the question, however, of whether these Riders of the Apocylapse are graduates of the WCC horsemanship program, but we still stand by the point that the apostles should have been smoking on that fateful night two-thousand years ago. It would kept them awake. Hey, It works in St. Athanasius Dormitory every night!