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The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

kiwihellenist.blogspot.com

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Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#121

Post by hprotagonist »

Zancarius wrote: post #114
hprotagonist wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh -- well if we're going _there_ then for sure add Brueggemann to your list. His "The Prophetic Imagination" is incendiary, even 40-odd years on.

This is dangerous. Logos has quite a few of his works in their library. I'm never going to get through my ever-growing backlog. And I still have yet to start on John Walton's Lost World series. Thanks! Haha!

Rabbi Tarfon said, “Where there is no bread, there is no Torah; where there is no Torah, there is no bread.”

it’s an interesting book that tells you to put the book down and go out and check in on your neighbor. So don’t let your backlog get in the way of that virtuous cycle.

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#122

Post by ShamelessC »

Jedd wrote: post #118
ShamelessC wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non contentious? Don’t a large portion of Christians believe the Bible is divine and any words included are there because of God?

Well, we get into murky territory here. I'd suggest a large portion of self-identified Christian believers really haven't thought much about it at all, beyond (as you say) some orthodox assumptions about divine nature etc. But as per my link above to wikipedia (Marcan Priority) the larger consensus amongst religious historians / researchers is that Mark was written first, Luke & Matthew were written subsequently, and…

Fascinating! Thanks I’ll have to read up on this mysterious Q figure and why it’s believed to be a ghost writer of sorts (is that accurate? Or is possibly just information lost to time?)

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#123

Post by ShamelessC »

defrost wrote: post #115
ShamelessC wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non contentious? Don’t a large portion of Christians believe the Bible is divine and any words included are there because of God?

There are a large number of camps that don't align about this issue. The King James Only movement alone: asserts the belief that the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is superior to all other translations of the Bible. and has been divided into five subgroups with varying opinions about the text and its relation to God. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement This barely scratches the surface of th…

Thanks! Very interesting.

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#124

Post by labster »

jowea wrote: post #36
labster wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why Martin Luther was smart and got the nailing part out of the way at the beginning.

Martin Luther had a lot of support and allied with the politically powerful. The later Radical Reformation was something else.

I don’t think that support was guaranteed at the beginning, though. Certainly Jan Hus suffered a worse fate, being too early, but Luther could have imagined meeting the same end (before meeting God obvs). The political situation mattered a lot, as did the printing press.

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#125

Post by labster »

hot_gril wrote: post #59
labster wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already are. And not just deep in the Harry Potter fandom, but in bitter, highly public schisms over the meaning.

I will fight someone in public over the time turner thing. No it's not a closed loop, yes they could've used it to kill Voldemort.

Man, I was thinking about the gay Dumbledore thing, and the trans thing of course (JKR has very different conceptions of her characters than some of her readers do). Those are like national newspaper debates.

But not as interesting as the origin of the race of orcs and whether it’s okay to use a Qenya word in Quenya.

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#126

Post by UncleOxidant »

542458 wrote: post #84
tines wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was thought that being rich meant you were close to God. If the people they thought were closest to God could scarcely be saved, then how could anyone else be? So the thinking goes. It's an argument a fortiori. Of course Jesus' point was that the poor and sinners are much closer to the kingdom of God than the rich, hence their astonishment.

Yes, this is a major point in the gospels and one of the things that was subversive at the time that's a bit lost on modern audiences. At the time, the prevailing belief was that good things happens to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. This is illustrated in John 9, where the disciples ask Jesus about a blind man: His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born b…

> Yes, this is a major point in the gospels and one of the things that was subversive at the time that's a bit lost on modern audiences. At the time, the prevailing belief was that good things happens to good people, and bad things happen to bad people.

And yet, here we are again. The prosperity gospel which a large chunk of not only American but also global evangelicals (specifically the pentecostal subset) subscribe to suggests that the rich are rich because God has blessed them. This is one explanation for why the previous president had so much support among evangelicals: He's rich and so it must mean God likes him. This is also (as the article suggests) why there has been a long and concerted effort to suggest that Jesus wasn't suggesting something entirely impossible (like the debunked city gate explanation)

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#127

Post by keiferski »

ShamelessC wrote: post #111
Jedd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was fairly non-contentious [0] that the authors of Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily (almost exclusively) from the author of Mark's work, along with this unknown source (usually referred to as Q). It seems fairly reasonable then to assume it was a literary device made by the author of Mark - his writing is actually pretty good as far as allegory goes - that was subsequently lifted near verbatim by the la…

Non contentious? Don’t a large portion of Christians believe the Bible is divine and any words included are there because of God?

I think a more charitable (and interesting, sociologically) interpretation is that certain Protestant groups want the authority of God to not be vested in a temporal organization like the Catholic Church, and so the book itself serves as a replacement for this. The problem of determining what that means arises then, and not initially from a desire to only follow the book directly.

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#128

Post by sn41 »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #102
ranprieur wrote: post #24

I don't buy the idea that changing camel to rope is about pleasing rich people, because a rope can still nowhere near get through the eye of a needle. But a rope is qualitatively the same kind of thing as a thread; so if camel is the right word, the message is that what gets into the kingdom of God is a whole different kind of thing than money.

I dont understand why people refuse to take this line as literally as possible - A rich person has as much chance of entering heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. Its just a humorous way of saying "fat chance" ... why read into it so much. Never made any sense to me.

I agree, but I guess it goes against things like the Work Ethic [1], the Prosperity Theology [2] and the funding sources of megachurches, all which take material prosperity as a sign of divine grace. It is strange that some megachurches who espouse "Sola fide" and "Sola scriptura" also directly contradict one of the famous sayings in the Gospels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Weber's_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#129

Post by marcus_holmes »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #102
ranprieur wrote: post #24

I don't buy the idea that changing camel to rope is about pleasing rich people, because a rope can still nowhere near get through the eye of a needle. But a rope is qualitatively the same kind of thing as a thread; so if camel is the right word, the message is that what gets into the kingdom of God is a whole different kind of thing than money.

I dont understand why people refuse to take this line as literally as possible - A rich person has as much chance of entering heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. Its just a humorous way of saying "fat chance" ... why read into it so much. Never made any sense to me.

That's how I read it. That he was just looking around exasperated trying to explain why rich people don't go to heaven, and saw a camel and made it up on the spot as an example of something that is obviously impossible.

I still find it fascinating that this simple, utterly unambiguous line, gets totally ignored or misinterpreted so that rich people get to call themselves christian while persecuting gay folks on the basis of vague OT references.

Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

#130

Post by marcus_holmes »

jknoepfler wrote: post #100
tines wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was thought that being rich meant you were close to God. If the people they thought were closest to God could scarcely be saved, then how could anyone else be? So the thinking goes. It's an argument a fortiori. Of course Jesus' point was that the poor and sinners are much closer to the kingdom of God than the rich, hence their astonishment.

That isn't the natural reading of the passage. The listeners express surprise when Jesus says "rich folks won't enter the kingdom of God". They then ask "well if not the rich, then who?" indicating that they think rich folks were the most likely to get in. If not them, then who? Jesus then says "no mortal person," explaining that only God makes it possible to enter the kingdom of heaven. He doesn't say poor people. H…

Then why does he single out the rich folks? It would make more sense in your interpretation to not include the "rich" and imply that any man entering heaven was impossible.
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