Posted on 05/21/2012 9:03:51 AM PDT by JustSayNoToNannies
An old textual conundrum regarding the New Testament, frequently revisited by those who fret over every jot and tittle, is whether Christ was really talking about a camel or only about a very thick rope. My money is on the camel, and not only because I am fond of both camels and outlandish metaphors; but it is a very old question what Jesus really said had a better chance of passing through a needle’s eye than a rich man had of entering God’s Kingdom. Many have suspected—even a few church fathers, like Cyril of Alexandria—that the Greek word kamelon (camel) might be a scribal error for kamilon (a heavy rope, a nautical cable), if only because the latter seems to make for a somewhat more symmetrical trope. Some have even made the argument that the Aramaic word gamla can mean either a camel or a rope, and so the error may antedate the written texts of the gospels altogether. On the other hand, the image of some large beast passing through a needle’s eye, as a piquant figure for something impossible, is found in other ancient Near Eastern sources, and the vastly preponderant weight of textual evidence still favors the contortionist dromedary over the elastic hawser.
Anyway, however diverting a question it is, it is not a very important one. The lesson imparted by the passage is just as uncompromisingly severe in either case. As a commentary on the plight of the rich young ruler who cannot bring himself to sell all he has, give the money to the poor, and follow Christ, it leaves little room for doubt that Christ is not merely rebuking one wealthy man for a lack of proper spiritual commitment, but is saying something very disquieting about wealth as such.
Of course, putting the matter that way invariably provokes murmurs or howls of protest, and down the years Christians have found a number of ingenious ways of getting around the plain meaning of Christ’s words. The silliest of these is the old myth—which I used to think was the invention of some nineteenth-century Protestant clergyman, but which is in fact considerably older—that the “Needle’s Eye” was a particularly low gate in the walls of Jerusalem, through which a laden camel could not pass without being unburdened or even (as one zoologically illiterate version has it) crawling through on its knees. There was no such gate, and camels are not that nimble, but it has often proved very comforting for affluent Christians to imagine that Jesus was really talking about adopting a proper attitude of humility or detachment rather than about submitting to actual dispossession.
A more nuanced strategy for rescuing Jesus from his unseemly radicalism has been to treat his words in this instance as an ironic castigation of those who vest their hopes in good works. John Calvin managed to invert the lesson of the passage almost entirely: The young ruler, he claimed, had asked an inept question, supposing that one could secure eternal life through works, and thus Christ’s metaphor was meant as an illustration of the impossibility of anyone fulfilling the requirements of the law, and of the need therefore for a total reliance upon faith.
This, it should be needless to say, is an entirely uncompelling gloss on the episode. It merely superimposes a traditional Augustinian reading of Paul’s language regarding grace and works of the law (one that competent New Testament scholars know to be erroneous) upon a text clearly irreconcilable with its premises. The teaching of Christ in the gospels is full of exhortations to “works righteousness,” however inconvenient they may prove for certain established strains of Christian dogmatics, and the episode of the young ruler is wholly lacking in the sort of exegetical ambiguities that might allow for reassuring evasions of that sort. Simply said, Jesus was not terribly encouraging about the spiritual condition—or prospects—of the rich.
I am not trying to start a theological debate here, however. I really just want to say something charitable about the Occupy Wall Street protestors, at least the most morally serious among them, because I have come to find a certain conservative critique of the movement painfully tiresome. By the time this column appears, the harsh winds of winter may already have scattered the demonstrators to their several lairs and subdued the clamor of their detractors, so this may come across as an exercise in l’esprit d’escalier.
But a few weeks back, in a nearly empty cafe at a small regional airport, I overheard a radio discussion in which two very loud men and an even louder woman were soundly excoriating the Occupy protestors for supposedly spreading contempt for “wealth creators” and for the industrious rich. All three interlocutors attested that they had been raised by pious parents to respect the wealthy and to emulate “those who’ve made something of themselves through hard work” for the sakes of their “families and investors.”
The larger issue of whether that quite exhausts the story of how great wealth may be legally acquired in our economic system was not raised, but there was not much room for subtlety in the narrow crevices between commercial breaks. In any event, it was all fairly conventional, merrily venomous talk-radio ranting, and I would probably have forgotten it a moment afterward if, at the end, the woman speaker had not opined that this “Occupy business” was all a part of the decay of the “traditional Christian values that built this nation”—a judgment to which the other two assented vigorously.
It was an oddly jarring moment. The ease with which Americans often confuse their civic and fiscal values with Christian virtues is always a little baffling, granted, and I realize that every Christian people has tended to confuse the interests and ideals of its class or nation or ideology or empire with the moral commands of the gospels. Many American Christians, though, have a special talent for elevating the blandest and most morally nugatory aspects of social and economic life to the status of positive spiritual goods, essentially laudable, and somehow all of a piece with the teachings of Christ.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with producing real goods and selling them at a fair price; it is admirable to labor diligently to care for one’s family and neighbors; to build a business that gives honest employment to those who need it is a worthy accomplishment. That, however, hardly consecrates everything that happens on the floor of the stock exchange as something continuous with Christian principles.
After all, when Christ talked about private wealth, he certainly seemed to associate it with spiritual impoverishment. In addition to his advice to the young ruler, there was his clear injunction to store up treasure not on earth but only in heaven, his rather pointed remarks on the impossibility of dual service to both God and Mammon, his parable about the rich man and Lazarus (which was not, I think we can grant, merely a warning against dissipation), and so on. As for imitating the personal industry of the rich, Christ enjoined his followers instead to take no thought for the morrow but to contemplate, emulously, those notoriously indolent lilies of the field. The New Testament as a whole, truth to tell, is fairly clear that the accumulation of great private wealth, even when honestly acquired, is spiritually perilous and, as a rule, morally unjust.
So, make what one will of the Occupy protestors—their stated aims are certainly amorphous enough to allow one to love or despise or ignore them as one chooses, and they are far too various a group to characterize uniformly, in any event—but I cannot really see how their actions constitute an assault on “Christian values.” Setting economic arguments aside for a moment, surely any Christian should acknowledge that at the heart of Christ’s teaching there was a prophetic critique of the pursuit and preservation of material wealth, and that it is hardly fitting then for Christians (even American Christians) to view these protests with simple self-confident disdain.
There is, I should add, no room for sanctimony in such observations. Certainly I cannot claim to have lived the life of the heroic renunciant, and no one can deny the force of the disciples’ question, “Who then can be saved?” But it is wise to recall that the Christ of the gospels has always been—and will always remain—far more disturbing, uncanny, and scandalously contrary a figure than we usually like to admit. Or, as an old monk of Mount Athos once said to me, summing up what he believed he had learned from more than forty years of meditation on the gospels, “He is not what we would make him.”
It is also important to note, that in Hebrew culture of the time of Christ, the "Eye of a Needle" also refers to doors that lay beside the main Gates in the city wall. At night main gates were closed to stop people from rampaging in and out of a city, but you did not wish to keep travelers completely barred from the city, thus when looking at most gates of the period you will see two smaller doors to either side of the main gate, these were left open and guarded at night. When a traveler needed in or out of the city, his camel would actually drop down on its knees and crawl through the smaller doors called "eyes of needles".
My understanding is that in Aramaic the words for camel and rope sound similar (like camel-cable) and the eye of the needle was a narrow (not low) gate.
IOW the metaphor was a pun, with four possible interpretations, one trivial; carrying a rope through a gateway, one unforgettably silly; cramming a large animal through a sewing needle, and two on point; the camel needing to be stripped of worldly possessions to fit though a narrow gate, and the rope needing to be peeled down to its minimal rope-yness, a single pure fiber, to fit into a sewing needle.
The crowd must have loved the clever play on words and truth.
My husband found a reading to share with his investment club back in the 90s that said that the Eye of the Needle was historically an entrance to Jerusalem. In order to go through, you basically had to pass through customs. You unloaded your camel completely, passed inspection, paid any fees, took your camel through and then on the other side you would put your stuff back on your camel and proceed. A loaded camel would not fit in the Eye.
So, the message was that you can’t be so attached to material things that you can’t bear to unload them when it’s time to go through the Gate. It’s not that you can’t have things and make use of them, it’s that they do not obsess you and make you a selfish, greedy person.
Thank you. I’m happy to see someone get this right for a change. When starting any conversation, it’s important to get the facts straight before starting. Otherwise it’s lessons are lost and you question everything that follows.
1. The teaching of Christ in the gospels is full of exhortations to “works righteousness,”
2. I am not trying to start a theological debate here
Snort.
. . . about halfway down at the link with a graphic.
The problem with libtards is they will use this scripture to confiscate your wealth under the guise of saving your soul.
Understanding the context is necessary to refute their "salvation."
From the same source you cite:
“Zondervan’s Pictorial Bible Dictionary” has a picture of a large city gate with a small door in it about four feet high and makes the following claim in the caption: “The Jaffa Gate in the wall of Jerusalem, showing the ‘Needle’s Eye.’ Small doors such as this were common features of the gates of ancient cities; humans could pass through fairly easily, but large animals, such as camels, had to be unloaded and then had to kneel to get through, even then with difficulty.” [citation needed]
According to InterVarsity Press’s Bible Background Commentary (Craig S. Keener ed., 1993), those who support this interpretation are mistaken because the gate in question was not constructed until the Middle Ages — well after the Gospels were written.[3]
[...] W. E Vine in his Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words notes: “The idea of appling the ‘needle’s eye’ to small gates seems to be a modern one; there is no ancient trace of it. The Lord’s object in the statement is to express human impossibility and there is no need to endeavor to soften the difficulty by taking the needle to mean anything more than the ordinary instrument. Mackie points out(Hasting’s Bible Dic.) that “an attempt is sometimes made to explain the words as a reference to the small door, a little over 2 feet square, in the large heavy gate of a walled city. This mars the figure without materially altering the meaning, and receives no justifaction from the language and traditions of Palestine”
These lerned types say that as the caravans of the wealthier merchants wound their way down these streets, their loads would bump and scrape on those balconies. Thus, "camels through the eyes of a needle." Metaphor. Bible loaded with it. Doesn't make it any less true.
*e.g., "children" in Arabic is literally translated as 'fledglings screaming for food in the nest." It is by context that one would know if the worthy oriental gentleman uttering the phrase was actually referring to his 47 children by his cousin Fatima and 8 of her sisters, or had some environmental concern about the fate of endangered desert hawk species. The Bible, unfortunately, was not written in straight Appalachian English, but the OT in Hebrew and other tongues, and the NT in rough and ready everyday Greek, describing and translating stories originally in Hebrew, Aramaic (Jesus' mother tongue), and other sources.
Simplified Greek was the go-to language for getting around in the Mediterranean, especially in the East. Sort of like the dog-lingo that passes for Tex-Mex along our so-called border.
Addressed in the article - did you read it?
"Many have suspected — even a few church fathers, like Cyril of Alexandria — that the Greek word kamelon (camel) might be a scribal error for kamilon (a heavy rope, a nautical cable), if only because the latter seems to make for a somewhat more symmetrical trope. Some have even made the argument that the Aramaic word gamla can mean either a camel or a rope, and so the error may antedate the written texts of the gospels altogether. On the other hand, the image of some large beast passing through a needle’s eye, as a piquant figure for something impossible, is found in other ancient Near Eastern sources, and the vastly preponderant weight of textual evidence still favors the contortionist dromedary over the elastic hawser."
Source?
My College Biblical Studies Professor.
Did nobody make it this far?
“Many American Christians, though, have a special talent for elevating the blandest and most morally nugatory aspects of social and economic life to the status of positive spiritual goods, essentially laudable, and somehow all of a piece with the teachings of Christ.
“Obviously there is nothing wrong with producing real goods and selling them at a fair price; it is admirable to labor diligently to care for one’s family and neighbors; to build a business that gives honest employment to those who need it is a worthy accomplishment. That, however, hardly consecrates everything that happens on the floor of the stock exchange as something continuous with Christian principles.
“After all, when Christ talked about private wealth, he certainly seemed to associate it with spiritual impoverishment. In addition to his advice to the young ruler, there was his clear injunction to store up treasure not on earth but only in heaven, his rather pointed remarks on the impossibility of dual service to both God and Mammon, his parable about the rich man and Lazarus (which was not, I think we can grant, merely a warning against dissipation), and so on. As for imitating the personal industry of the rich, Christ enjoined his followers instead to take no thought for the morrow but to contemplate, emulously, those notoriously indolent lilies of the field. The New Testament as a whole, truth to tell, is fairly clear that the accumulation of great private wealth, even when honestly acquired, is spiritually perilous”
Exactly my thought as well!
Yes, oddly enough, I did.
I somehow managed to glaze over that paragraph, but caught it rereading it after I posted. I figured that my best bet would be to lay low and hope nobody called me on it, but NOOOOOooooooo...
http://www.biblicalhebrew.com/nt/camelneedle.htm
Just as the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Andrew3 refers the saying to a literal camel and needle, so we are not meant to reason away the apparent difficulty of getting a camel through a needle’s eye. For the difficulty is not apparent it is real, and not be solved by textual trickery but by taking the ludicrous language at face value.
What we have instead then, I believe, is a beautiful Hebrew hyperbole, as in the tree sticking out of one’s eye whilst one is removing a speck in another’s eye! Indeed, Jewish Talmudic literature uses a similar aphorism about an elephant passing through the eye of a needle as a figure of speech implying the unlikely or impossible:
“They do not show a man a palm tree of gold, nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle.”4
This first instance concerned dreams and their interpretation and suggested that men only dream that which is natural or possible, not that which is unlikely ever to have occurred to them.
“… who can make an elephant pass through the eye of a needle.”5
In this case, the illustration concerns a dispute between two rabbis, one of whom suggests that the other is speaking “things which are impossible”.
The camel was the largest animal seen regularly in Israel, whereas in regions where the Babylonian Talmud was written, the elephant was the biggest animal. Thus the aphorism is culturally translated from a camel to an elephant in regions outside of Israel.
The aim is not, then, to explain away the paradox and make the needle a huge carpet needle for, elsewhere, the Jewish writings use the “eye of the needle” as a picture of a very small place, “A needle’s eye is not too narrow for two friends, but the world is not wide enough for two enemies.”6 . The ludicrous contrast between the small size of the needle’s eye and the largest indigenous animal is to be preserved for its very improbability.
Jesus’ hearers believed that wealth and prosperity were a sign of God’s blessing (cf. Leviticus and Deuteronomy). So their incredulity is more along the lines that, “if the rich, who must be seen as righteous by God by dint of their evident blessing, can’t be saved, who can be?”. Later Christians have turned this around to portray wealth as a hindrance to salvation, which it can be – but no more so than many other things, when the message is that salvation is impossible for all men for it comes from God alone.
But beyond impossibility is possibility with God for, elsewhere, a Jewish midrash records:
“The Holy One said, open for me a door as big as a needle’s eye and I will open for you a door through which may enter tents and [camels?]”7
In other words God only needs the sinner to open up just a crack for him and God will come pouring in and set up room for an oasis. God only needs a ‘foot in the door’, so to speak.
This is similar to the Talmudic use of two Hebrew letters, one which represents God holiness (’Q’ Qoph, as in qadôsh ‘holy’) and another representing evil (’R’ Resh, as in ra’ ‘evil’), in a story told for the purpose of teaching the Hebrew alphabet and Jewish morals. It is said that ‘q’ has a separated opening in order that should ‘r’ repent he may enter into God’s holiness through the small opening.
Notes
3 “13 There was a rich man named Onesiphorus who said: If I believe, shall I be able to do wonders? Andrew said: Yes, if you forsake your wife and all your possessions. He was angry and put his garment about Andrew’s neck and began to beat him, saying: You are a wizard, why should I do so? 14 Peter saw it and told him to leave off. He said: I see you are wiser than he. What do you say? Peter said: I tell you this: it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Onesiphorus was yet more angry and took his garment off Andrew’s neck and cast it on Peter’s and haled him along, saying: You are worse than the other. If you show me this sign, I and the whole city will believe but if not you shall be punished. 15 Peter was troubled and stood and prayed: Lord, help us at this hour, for thou hast entrapped us by thy words. 16 The Saviour appeared in the form of a boy of twelve years, wearing a linen garment ‘smooth within and without’, and said; Fear not: let the needle and the camel be brought. There was a huckster in the town who had been converted by Philip; and he heard of it, and looked for a needle with a large eye, but Peter said: Nothing is impossible with God rather bring a needle with a small eye. 17 When it was brought, Peter saw a camel coming and stuck the needle in the ground and cried: In the name of Jesus Christ crucified under Pontius Pilate I command thee, camel, to go through the eye of the needle. The eye opened like a gate and the camel passed through; and yet again, at Peter’s bidding. 18 Onesiphorus said: You are a great sorcerer: but I shall not believe unless I may send for a needle and a camel. And he said secretly to a servant: Bring a camel and a needle, and find a defiled woman and some swine’s flesh and bring them too. And Peter heard it in the spirit and said: O slow to believe, bring your camel and woman and needle and flesh. 19 When they were brought Peter stuck the needle in the ground, with the flesh, the woman was on the camel. He commanded it as before, and the camel went through, and back again. 20 Onesiphorus cried out, convinced and said: Listen. I have lands and vineyards and 27 litrae of gold and 50 of silver, and many slaves: I will give my goods to the poor and free my slaves if I may do a wonders like you. Peter said: If you believe, you shall. 21 Yet he was afraid he might not be able, because he was not baptized, but a voice came: Let him do what he will. So Onesiphorus stood before the needle and camel and commanded it to go through and it went as far as the neck and stopped. And he asked why. ‘Because you are not yet baptized.’ He was content, and the apostles went to his house, and 1,000 souls were baptized that night.” (Acts of Peter and Andrew vv.14-21, The Apocryphal New Testament, M R James, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924, p459).
4 Babylonian Talmud, Berakoth, 55b
5 Babylonian Talmud, Baba Mezi’a, 38b
6 Source not traced but cf. Midrash Rabbah, Genesis 1.3
7 Midrash Rabbah, The Song of Songs, 5.3; cf. Pesiqta R., 15, ed. Friedmann, p.70a; Soncino Zohar, Vayikra 3, p95a
A common claim, but as shown in this thread the bulk of the evidence is against it.
The article seems to have left out Jesus’ conclusion.
Matthew 19:24-26
King James Version (KJV)
24 And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
25 When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved?
26 But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
Which seems to say that rich men can be saved.
My fiancee’ who is Jewish has been to Jerusalem and has seen the eye of the needle gate and he says its a smaller gate that a camel can pass through but only after you take off its pack.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.