I was thinking you could liquefy a camel and pass the liquid through a tiny tube passing through a very small standard needle. Is a liquefied camel still a camel in the eyes of God?
I don’t think Jesus imagined the rich man building a giant needle.
Link to the Mailbag Answer: …camel through the eye of a needle
Then the next problem would be liquifying the camel. How would you do that? With heat? Then you would have to make sure the melting point of the camel was lower than that of the tube & needle or else the entire camel would not pass through anyway and you are back to square one. However, if the needle was elastic or some other stretchible substance…
No,no,no. You use a BIG Cuisinart or Blender. Or a little one and a lot of time. Just like the Bass-O-Matic.
And remember, the original quote doesn’t say t’s IMPOSSIBLE for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, just that it’s difficult. And after cutting up a camel into cuisinart-sized chunks you’ll appeciate just how difficult.
Come one people! :rolleyes: It would be easier (and less cruel) to build the giant needle mentioned in the OP. And the giant needle could be reused to let any number of camels pass through it.
It would have to be a realistic and practical needle, otherwise that’s cheating. A giant needle need not have a giant eye. One would need a use for a needle which required a camel-width sized thread otherwise it would not be a needle, it would be a camel-passing device.
picmr
Assuming the giant needle were in proportion to a regular needle, and making the opening, say doorway width so the camel could get through it… then you’d need a ramp leading up to the eye (assuming the needle is stuck pointy-end in the ground)… My calculations indicate that you to have a ramp about half a mile long leading up to the eye, and a similar half a mile long leading the camel down again…
… ready?
… Thus verifying the expression, “I’d walk a camel for a mile.”
I MAD artist Al Jaffee’s Book of Magic he shows you that you simply put the camel in a helicopter and fly it through the eye of a giant needle (“So tell me where it says how big a needle!”)
I still think you’re all just trying to get out of all the work of cutting up the camel into camel shish-kabob and pureeing it. Remember, good fun takes some work!
I remember reading, in one of my Intro to New Testament text books, that the word for rope was only one letter away from that for camel? Somehow, “it is easier to thread a needle with a rope, then a rich man enter heaven” evokes a more useful image to me.
Well obviously the giant needle would double as a tourist trap.
“See the amazing giant needle!”
“The largest needle in the world, exit 257 in 2 miles!”
Wall Street Journal ad:
“Christian Businessmen? Plutocrats? Unsure of your place in Paradise? Come to Needles, California (the perfect place for this tourist trap) and be comforted!”
etc…
The “rope” and “camel” thing is true, that the words are similar. However, as noted in the Mailbag Answer, there are several rabbinic parallels (like, elephant through the eye of a needle) used to imply absurdity or impossibility.
THere is no way to prove or disprove that “camel” is a typo for “rope,” of course, except that the version using “camel” seems more consistent with the theology and context.
Threading a rope through a needle sounds too logical, to me. The context is to say that it is NOT logical, not reasonable, not in the same frame at all.
A rope is hundreds of threads, all wound together. Just as the desires of the rich man are too intertwined to allow his entry into the kingdom. His desire for the kingdom is bound up with his desire for possessions, status, etc.
And I think the impossible image of trying to cram a rope through a tiny needle still works…
Also, later Rabinic parables may have picked up on the same typo, and missed the clever metaphor.
The problem with the typo theory…
If it was a simple misspelling at some point in copying the original text, don’t you think somebody would have quickly picked up the change from “rope” to “camel”? I mean, semantically the two are so different that it would take a real boner to say, “Oh look, it says camel through needle eye, how catchy,” when the original says “rope”. I would think the first person reading the copy would see that, think, “That can’t be right,” and go check the original. Or change it back.
However, it is much more believable someone would copy it correctly, and the next guy think, “That can’t be right,” and change it to rope just to satisfy his conceptual notions.
Not necessarily. This is a sacred text. First guy copies it as camel/needle. Doesn’t notice his mistake. Next guy reading it to the congregation takes it as the carefully copied word of god, makes the best of the situation (meant to show, um, absurdity!). Some time later, copying carries the mistake a permanent part of the memome.
This isn’t the only place this is suspected of happening, a fe wexamples of similar suspect texts were given in my Intro to New Testament class. I will grab the textbook when I get back home and try to dig them up.
As for the second bit, no text has been found with the word rope. So there has been no reverse “correction” of an original intended meaning. It is merely speculation based on the difference of one letter.
Wouldn’t it be a whole lot simpler to pass a needle through the eye of the camel?
::ducks and runs::
… or through the eye of a beholder?
Incidentally, the Greek words are:
kamelos = camel
kamilos = rope
I’m with “rope”, myself.
CKDextHavn, the following is part of a response I received to a question sent to a Catholic apologist site. Is this just a variation of the “Needle’s Eye” gate in Jerusalem? It seems more generic (as if all temples then had this type of gate, whereas your research suggests to me that the “Needle’s Eye” was a very specific locale). Same thing or something different?
Same situation, Bob. No such place, no such feature. NO, that’s not the way gates were made.
The whole POINT of the damn thing is the aburdity of the comparison. Jesus WASN’T trying to give a plausible metaphor, he was using an outrageous comparison, both for humor (yes, the Bible has a sense of humor) and for dramatic impact.
A saying such as, “It’s as hard to thread a needle with a rope as for a rich man to get to heaven” is NOT what he’s saying. He’s not saying it’s tricky, he’s saying it’s impossible… without faith.
We have many similar examples in the language. “I’ll eat my hat,” for instance. No one makes up stories about how people once carried large loafs of bread by balancing them on their heads, so they could in fact eat their hats.
Shakespeare says, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, to have a thankless child.” So, Myron, you think maybe Shakespeare really meant to say “fangless child” and it was a copying error? Pah! Fiddle!
I don’t unnerstand why the Hell so many people try to avoid the plain, simple meaning of the camel-through-needle’s-eye phrase. Unless my friend the pastor is right and people just don’t really want to confront the issue.