Last week, at the age of 46, I moved with my family into a home, with a garden and a garage, in the Shropshire countryside. I feel guilty about my privilege, but not as guilty as Russell Brand does about his, which makes me a worse person, I think. In one of the extracts from his book, Revolutionarama (Crapstone, £8.45), in the Guardian last week, Brand explains this means I am like a monkey, Monkey A, who gets given grapes, while another monkey, Monkey B, gets envious because he is only given cucumbers.

It was the first of many Guardian selections from My Revolutiony Wution (Cornershop, £8.45) that left me both confused and ashamed. Brand’s writing makes my brain feel like when you pick up a paving slab and there’s all horrible white things wriggling around and weird beetles carrying little translucent eggs from one place to another in lines, yeah? Sick, in other words, but kind of turned on at the same time, like a post-coital female praying mantis vomiting up the salty corpse of its recently digested lover.

The problem with Brand’s monkey metaphor for me is that I personally am as happy to eat grapes as cucumbers, though I’m not mad about either. On balance I’d say, controversially, I prefer cucumbers. With a grape what you see is what you get, but you can slice cucumbers up and do all sorts of things with them. Dip ’em! Put ’em in sandwiches. Or just eat ’em as they be! I’d be happy to give Monkey B all my grapes in exchange for just one cucumber, as long as I had some kind of chopping or slicing mechanism. I suppose this is why I lost my job as an experimental laboratory grape-hoarding monkey and was instead told to go and sit in front of an infinite number of typewriters to churn out these fill-in columns for the Observer.

Yesterday I began to unpack my book collection from the removal boxes. But Brand’s anti-materialist dialectic is in my brain. Does owning all these books make me happy? I am ashamed to admit it does. But some of my books have been in boxes for so many years I have quite forgotten how I ever came by them. In this respect, I now realise, they are like my beliefs, things I carry around with me unquestioningly until someone such as Russell Brand, or Bill Hicks, or Mr Miyagi, comes along and smashes them out of the park with a well-tuned metaphor drawn from the world of grape-coveting primates.

To my surprise, I appear to own an 1882 copy of Fairfax’s Daemonologia that once belonged to Dr H Arthur Allbutt, a Leeds GP struck off the register in 1887 for publishing his controversial Wife’s Handbook, in which the would-be guru forbade wives the excitements of bread but recommended calming cocaine. And here’s an 1872 edition of Hardwick’s Traditions, Superstitions and Folk-Lore (Chiefly Lancashire And The North Of England) formerly owned by the bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church, practitioner of ritual magic, and confidante of Aleister Crowley, William Bernard Crow. Despite all these achievements the society mystic remains best known as the man who patented the knitted toilet roll cover dolly, a tragedy as great as if Brand were to be remembered only as the bloke who never quite settled on a viable voice for an animated rabbit in Hop.

At the bottom of the box is what appears to be a 1924 edition of Arthur Machen’s Dog and Duck, once the property of Christian philosopher Austin Duncan-Jones of All Souls. All of its pages, on closer examination, have been substituted for an entirely different text, pasted in between the covers, namely an unedited transcript in ancient Aramaic of The Gospel According to Jesus. Yes. Jesus himself. In his own words. I couldn’t believe it. I picked a random page and dredged up my O-level Aramaic.

“‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth…’ I know what you’re thinking. ‘Fat chance of that happening, Jesus, mate. What are you talking about? Have you been back on the gear or what?’ No. No. Hear me out.” It was gold dust! And it read as if it could have been written yesterday by one of the celebrity authors today.

Realising what I was sitting on – namely all of humanity’s big questions answered by the greatest philosopher-poet of all time – I swiftly tried to establish legal ownership of the text, in order to monetise it to the max, optimise its commercial potential, and spread its message of hope to all mankind. I hadn’t read all of Jesus’s book yet, but I knew I needed to broker percentages on Kindle™ rights, Guardian serialisation, movie adaptations, graphic novels, online gaming, apps, ipps, blips, blaps, snips, snaps, immersive publicly subsidised musical theatre experiences, cosplay events, sex toys, e-wank and cross-platform digitised content streams, should such exploitation opportunities become manifest. We live in a content-driven culture and Jesus could be the ultimate content provider. With an eye on the youth market and introduction into school curriculums, I swiftly renamed the cumbersome Gospel According to Jesus as the more teen-friendly My Gospely Wospel, and got to work.

On Thursday night I began reading My Gospely Wospel in earnest. It was full of good ideas but needed editing. I trimmed some waffle, crossed out some idiotic stuff about not voting, and reinstated deleted sections about how Jesus had been inspired by his love of Mary Magdalene, the most interesting part of the book. But by the end I was sick of Jesus. He got everything he wanted – fame, followers, wine, women and song – but he was still not satisfied, and blamed this on the imperfect world rather than some absence in himself. Which isn’t to say the world wasn’t at fault as well, of course. I mean, it definitely is. It’s appalling.

In the morning when I awoke, there was a strange musky smell in the room, as if a wet Eric Pickles had been sleeping on my bed. All of my edits had been undone by a supernatural hand. There was a menacing image drawn on my mirror in eyeliner. This text, it appeared, was Gospel. I pencilled my name next to Austin Duncan-Jones’s on the first page of the book, put the book back in the box, put the box in the cellar, locked the door, and threw away the key.

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (Series 3) is released on 10 November and tickets for 2015 tour dates are now on sale. stewartlee.co.uk