The Straight Dope Mailbag: What's the meaning of Jesus' teaching about the camel going through the eye of a needle?

"The notion your Baptist friend has picked up apparently comes from a single ninth-century commentary which asserts that in first-century Jerusalem there was a gate called the Needle's Eye which a camel could only get through on its knees. (Sort of like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "only the penitent man will pass...") A cute allegory, but there's no archaeological or historical evidence for the existence of such a gate.

There's a good brief discussion in the article on "kamelos" in Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 3, pp. 592-594 (one of the standard works on New Testament language.) TDNT, and other commentators with an interest in history, point out that there are several parallels in later rabbinic language about the impossibility of getting an elephant through the eye of a needle: it's a way of describing something which is so impossible that it's grotesque.

So the "Gate of the Needle's Eye" notion has no firm historical basis. It looks like a way of getting around the plain (but inconvenient) meaning of the text.

Setting the text in the whole New Testament context, wealth is consistently presented as a *problem*."


Stupid apologists.