Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why people don't want to take this line literally is very simple: they don't want to believe that they can't live a life of luxury and still go into heaven. If you're both a believer and rich, you can either live with the cognitive dissonance, renounce your faith, or just reinterpret the precepts you don't like to suit you.
There are some lyrics by a band called the Divine Comedy (how apposite) that used to make me smile: The cars in the churchyard are shiny and German (Distinctly at odds with the theme of the sermon), And during communion I study the people Threading themselves through the eye of the needle.
The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
251–260 of 298 posts
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#252kjv text for reference > And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear…
In context, the new believers were frequently put out of their homes and sent destitute, so being willing to give it all up was a requirement. That said, there isn't a whole lot of evidence what is meant here and a rope makes more sense than a camel, because a rich man can become poorer by giving it up just as a rope can be made thinner (by taking away most of the fibers), whereas a camel just can't manage at all. It…
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#253In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for camel is gamlo (ܓܐܡܠܐ) while the word for rope is gamla (ܓܐܡܠܥ). Mixing these up would be an easy mistake to make. Matthew and Luke both took some info from Mark but also took some info from the Q source and their own sources. Since all three have this same wording, it is likely the error came through Mark.
Certainly, neither Paul writing in the 50s, nor the Roman church elders who wrote 1 Clements in the 60s had heard of a Jesus ever saying anything noteworthy, despite that backup from that quarter would have enormously eased their own arguments. The anonymous author of "Mark" writing in the 70s evidently confabulated a Jesus to mouth Paul's opinions (as found in his letters) to silence quarrelsome opposition. Amazingly, "Mark" seems to have had little more than Paul to draw on, even then. Every scrap else written down seems to have been torched by his time.
It is particularly interesting that (the anonymous forger of the book of) "John" chose to scrub the "camel" line from his personal canon.
There is not so much as a hint of actual evidence that there was ever any such thing as a Q source, nor M, L, or J; nor any "oral traditions". All are figments of the bubbling "biblical scholar" imagination. The dozens of other gospels left out of the canon, and the even more numerous forged Pauline letters, a few adopted as canon, illustrate how wholesale fabrication was the normal mode of literary production in the early Church. What the anonymous authors of "Matthew" wrote not found in "Mark", of "Luke" that wasn't in either, and of "John" that wasn't in any, is very evidently their personal opinions on what their private Jesuses should have said. ("John" even invented from whole cloth an entire disciple, Lazarus, as his own Jesus's favorite that the other gospels have as at most a wholly hypothetical figure.)
If you are curious about the scholarship, you could start at "Why Invent the Jesus" on YT. Literally none of it has even been replied to, never mind refuted, in any peer-reviewed medium.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to admit that the fact that various commentators suggest THREE different languages happen to have words for camel and rope that sound almost the same does rather bolster the case being made here. Someone want to suggest a seafaring rope known as kyummel or something?
First of all, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, English, etc. all have very similar words for camel/gimel/gamal/etc. (The Greek letter Gamma and the Hebrew/Phoenician letter Gimel derive from a drawing of a camel's head. Though, it's probably originally derives from a drawing of a boomerang-like hunting stick with a rhyming name in Demotic, and "throwing-stick" probably got switched to "camel" when the Phoenicians adap…
Notice though that the anonymous author of "John" appears to have tried to scrub it in the early/mid second century. It was apparently already a troublesome image by that time.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just looking it up online as I have no personal knowledge here, the Hebrew word for rope, חבל (hevel, pronounced as ḥ or χ) apparently has shared roots with Arabic, Syriac, Akkadian and Ugaritic that all have similar sounding words and the current guess it that there was a proto-semitic word like "ḥabl" and of course none of those sound like camel or gamal, so you can at least strike Hebrew and Arabic from the list o…
That would be the common word for rope. The claim isn't that it's the ordinary word for rope, but rather a more rare word for rope, maybe for a particular type of rope made of camel hair. Others here have posted the Aramaic word in question.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are some parts of Matthew and Luke that neither come from Mark nor Q so they each also have one or more other sources unique to themselves. Given that we know nothing about the provenance or contents of 'Q' - it's lost to time, and its hypothetical existence is effectively intuited by some researches - I do not understand how we can identify the set of things 'not in Q' (or indeed 'in Q'). I'd also note that…
So your theory is they simply made up the exact same stuff? Maybe you do believe in miracles after all then.
There is not a hint of evidence for unattested "sources" beyond their fevered imaginations. Making shit up was just how the stuff was produced, at the time, as illustrated by the (literally!) dozens of other "gospels" and forged epistles from the same period.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a look around for this recently discovered book, but can't find references -- can you point me towards some please, it'd be fascinating to read the contents / context.
I can’t find anything either. Q is probably an aggregate of the best creative free form half truth conspiracy writings that one was able to gather from various internet sources mixed with a garden variety of new age mystical belief and a dash of pure fn magic.
"Q", like "oral traditions", Docetism, and Gnosticism, turns out to be a fever dream of "biblical scholars" working before sound textual analysis had been invented.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such a belief would be heretical and very much outside the bounds of any canonical Christianity. (The phrase you're looking for is "divinely inspired", but Christianity also teaches that all of world history is also divinely inspired. It's a very broad category.)
Isn't it an article of faith for some Christian groups that the King James version of the Bible was produced by 100 scholars each translating a Greek text independently, and each producing the exact same English translation, thus proving that God had directly guided them in this translation, and essentially making the KJV almost literal word of God?
It is a small lie from among an enormously larger corpus.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> His words reflect an ancient Jewish figure of speech for the impossible The article claims that the Gospels are the oldest known use of the figure of speech.
Maybe, at least in "modern" writing. The problem I have with that claim is that the phrasing "eye of a needle" appears in Talmudic writings that predate the NT, so the idea itself likely predates that, and other creatures (elephants) have been used instead of camels. Granted, this is just hair-splitting, but I would strongly suspect its use dates much earlier.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#260kjv text for reference > And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear…
In context, the new believers were frequently put out of their homes and sent destitute, so being willing to give it all up was a requirement. That said, there isn't a whole lot of evidence what is meant here and a rope makes more sense than a camel, because a rich man can become poorer by giving it up just as a rope can be made thinner (by taking away most of the fibers), whereas a camel just can't manage at all. It…