Was the camel Jesus’ go-to funny animal?!

[notes on the humor and the harshness of Jesus—and how NOT to interpret the camel and the needle’s eye!]

Camels are proof that God has a sense of humor. (T-shirt slogan)

James (19): Do you think Jesus was speaking humorously when he told Peter he would make him a fisher of men? It sounds very serious when you read it in church, but…

Me: It’s easy to minimize Jesus’ sense of humor. Some of—

Anna (17): Let’s not de-humorize Jesus, the way we de-feathered the T-Rex.

Me: (stunned hilarity)

Suz: No, Papa, you cannot put that on social media right now—it’s time for prayers.¹

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Of all the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels that are sometimes scrutinized for evidence of Jesus’ overlooked sense of humor, the most telling example, I think, occurs in the midst of the long, polemical passage in Matthew 23 in which Jesus attacks onerous, hypocritical religious prescriptions associated with scribes and Pharisees.² The passage opens with what can easily be read as a satirical roast:

“The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, greetings in marketplaces, and the salutation ‘Rabbi.’” (Matthew 23:1–7, NAB³)

I can’t help imagining Jesus delivering the line about phylacteries and tassels with pantomiming gestures illustrating just how long and wide they were—likely exaggerating the reality! I’m not saying Jesus was definitely going for laughs, but it’s certainly a plausible reading. Less debatable to me, in any case, is this blistering burn about halfway through:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. But these you should have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!” (Matthew 23:24)

“Strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!” If someone doesn’t see the hyperbolic humor of that image, I don’t know what to say to them.⁴ Just imagine someone saying in a very serious tone, “You’re like a man saying, ‘Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup!’ without noticing the elephant in your soup spoon!”

The absurdity of the image—the tiny gnat and the enormous camel side by side in a bowl or cup, and someone being concerned about straining out the insect while overlooking and even swallowing the humongous ungulate!—resonates with other dramatically hyperbolic or impossible sayings of Jesus. An obvious parallel is the one about very differently sized objects in one’s eye:

“Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:1–5)

The similar contrast between a tiny speck or splinter (a reasonable thing to have in one’s eye) and the absurdly large wooden beam or log (which could no more be lodged undetected in one’s eye than a camel could be swallowed) suggests the same sense of humor at work.⁵

The Gospel reading for this past weekend, the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, includes another absurd image of this sort—and, like the one from Matthew 23, it includes a camel:

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” The disciples were amazed at his words. So Jesus again said to them in reply, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God.” (Mark 10:23–27)

This second hyperbolic or impossible camel image raises a tantalizing possibility: Did Jesus think camels were funny? Or were camels at least, in Jesus’ mind, a vivid go-to image of an unmanageably, awkwardly immense thing, offering at least potential for humor—not unlike elephants in elephant jokes?

Very unhappily, the paucity of evidence leaves this lovely idea a mere possibility—or, at best, a probability. The rule of thumb calling for three examples to substantiate a trend reasonably applies here. In the absence of a third dominical camel-saying, we may perhaps plausibly suppose, but cannot confidently conclude, that camels occupied a specific place in Jesus’ imagination of conspicuous, potentially humorous largeness.⁶

In fact, whether we have even two hyperbolic camel-saying from Jesus has been challenged from at least two directions, with attempts to remove both the needle’s eye and the camel from the passage.

The first challenge is the notion, often repeated by well-meaning homilists,⁷ that by “the eye of a needle” Jesus means, not the eye of a literal needle, but a low, narrow gate in the walls of Jerusalem, supposedly known as the “Needle’s Eye gate,” through which camels could pass only unburdened of baggage and possibly kneeling. (Thus, you see, the rich can be saved only through detachment and humility!) On this accounting, with the eye of a literal needle removed, the saying loses its hyperbolic force. The issue is not the camel’s size, but merely its burdens and/or its posture. The saying thus becomes a restatement of Jesus’ remarks elsewhere about the way of salvation as a “narrow gate” (Matthew 7:13–14; Luke 13:24).

Relief visualization of the “Needle’s Eye gate” interpretation of Jesus’ words in a Dortmund church portal. By Mathias Bigge – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

The second challenge proposes that “camel” is a scribal error or textual corruption, and that Jesus and/or the evangelists actually used an almost identical word meaning thick nautical rope or ship’s cable. Jesus would thus have been implicitly contrasting two very different thicknesses of string-like material, appealing to imagery familiar to the fishing communities he often addressed. On this accounting, the hyperbolic element is still present, if somewhat diminished, and the camel-swallowing business becomes Jesus’ only camel-saying.

This is where I acknowledge (as I have in the past) that, while I have a couple of seminary degrees and a more than passing interest in biblical history, translation, and interpretation, what knowledge I have in these areas is not remotely scholarly expertise. I’ve done my best to handle the scholarship of others accurately and responsibly, but cross-examination and corrections are welcome!

The Needle’s Eye gate?

Often taken for a post-Reformation exegetical conceit, the Needle’s Eye gate interpretation has in fact existed at least since the eleventh century. On the other hand, no such gate is known to archaeology or history. The earliest source both for the interpretation and for the alleged existence of the gate is Anselm of Canterbury, in a fragment preserved by Thomas Aquinas⁸ in his Catena Aurea or Golden Chain, a commentary on the Gospels drawn from the Church Fathers:

At Jerusalem there was a certain gate called the Needle’s Eye, through which a camel could not pass but on its bended knees, and after its burden had been taken off; and so the rich should not be able to pass along the narrow way that leads to life, till he had put off the burden of sin, and of riches, that is, by ceasing to love them.⁹

Although older than the modern texts sometimes thought to be the source of this idea, Anselm’s reference is far too late to have historical value regarding the alleged existence of this gate.¹⁰ This explanation of the text was also apparently unknown to early Fathers commenting on this passage centuries before Anselm, who took the needle’s eye for the eye of a literal needle. For example, Augustine writes:

A camel to go through the eye of a needle! If he had said a gnat, it would be impossible.¹¹ And then when his disciples heard it, they were grieved and said, “If this be so, who can be saved?”

Likewise John Chrysostom:

But having said it was hard; as he proceeds, he shows that it is even impossible, and not merely impossible, but even in the highest degree impossible; and this he showed by the comparison concerning the camel and the needle.

“It is easier,” says he, “for a camel to enter in by the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Whence it is shown, that there is no ordinary reward for them that are rich, and are able to practise self command. Wherefore also he affirmed it to be a work of God, that he might show that great grace is needed for him who is to achieve this. At least, when the disciples were troubled, he said, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”

These comments from Augustine and Chrysostom highlight two important elements in the text: the astonishment of Jesus’ disciples and Jesus’ confirmation of the proposed action as not merely difficult, but in some sense “impossible” (at least seemingly so, or in human terms, etc.). To unpack a camel and oblige it to scrunch its way through a low, narrow opening might be laborious and time-consuming, but it would have been (by hypothesis!) quite doable.¹² If this were all Jesus meant—if the disciples recognized that he was alluding to an onerous but well-known method of getting a camel through a restrictive but passable opening—the obvious inference would be that the salvation of the rich is likewise challenging but entirely attainable. The astonished reply “Then who can be saved?” does not suggest this inference.¹³

If that weren’t enough, Jesus’ reply clinches the point: “For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God.” When Jesus characterizes entering the kingdom as “hard,” he means not “a time-consuming hassle” but “impossible.” In addition to being historically unsubstantiated, the Needle’s Eye gate interpretation downplays the radical challenge of Jesus’ words.

The needle’s eye in Semitic literature

A third difficulty with the “narrow gate” interpretation is that the needle’s eye as an idiom for the tiniest of openings—often in the context of the impossibility of something far too large passing through it—appears repeatedly in ancient Jewish literature. For example, the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (composed in the late fourth to early fifth century, but containing much older material) offers the following insightful commentary on the relatively realistic nature of dream imagery:

One is neither shown a golden palm tree nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle in a dream. In other words, dreams only contain images that enter a person’s mind.

The same image appears in the Bava Metzia, in which we find Rav Sheshet mocking what he evidently considers Rav Amram’s specious reasoning with the words:

“Perhaps you are from Pumbedita, where people pass an elephant through the eye of a needle?”

In this saying “passing an elephant through the eye of a needle” is not unlike such expressions as “smoke and mirrors” (a conjuring metaphor for deceptive technique that can make anything seem possible, no matter how ridiculous) or “turning black into white” (an idiom connected with the glibly silver-tongued Squealer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who could convince anyone of anything, regardless of evidence to the contrary).

Fascinatingly, the Midrash Rabbah on Song of Songs 5.3 invokes a needle’s eye as a metaphor for the slightest of openings becoming a wide way of salvation through divine power—and there’s a possible mention of camels!

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?].¹⁴

On the other hand, contrasting with both Midrash Rabbah and the Synoptic Gospels, the Quran deploys the image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle as a metaphor for the utter impassibility of the way of salvation for the arrogant—with no mention of the possibility of divine aid:

To those who reject Our signs and treat them with arrogance, no opening will there be of the gates of heaven, nor will they enter the garden, until the camel can pass through the eye of the needle: Such is Our reward for those in sin.

Do these and other “needle’s eye” references in Semitic literature reflect idiomatic usage perhaps going back to Jewish culture in Jesus’ day or even earlier? Or was Jesus’ own saying in the Synoptic Gospels the origin of this type of expression? Such questions are unanswerable—but either way the apparent link is suggestive for how Jesus’ words should be understood. If the “needle’s eye” was already an idiom in Jesus’ day, connoting an essentially impassible barrier and often juxtaposed with objects far too large to pass, then Jesus’ words are most reasonably understood in the same way that such language is used elsewhere in Jewish culture.¹⁵

On the other hand, if Jesus’ words are the origin of this language, inspiring similar sayings in various rabbic and other Semitic texts, then it seems relevant that these ancient sources—all much closer in time and culture to Jesus’ Jewish world than later Christian writers like Anselm—never suggest that the “needle’s eye” was anything other than the eye of a literal needle. While we can’t reconstruct every detail of the world of Jesus’ first hearers as they would have brought it to a saying like “a camel passing through the eye of a needle,” one important step in our efforts to think like Jesus’ first hearers is to think like later Jewish writers. If the idea of a large animal passing through a “needle’s eye” seems not to put later Jewish writers in mind of a certain gate in Jerusalem, that’s a fair indication that Jesus’ first hearers probably wouldn’t have had that thought either—likely because such a gate never existed, and hadn’t even been dreamed up at that point.

All in all, there is more than enough reason for homilists to retire this chestnut! We can confidently presume that the “eye of a needle” meant to Jesus and his first hearers just what it means to you or me: the eye of a literal needle. Jesus’ teaching about the camel and the needle’s eye is not a mere restatement of the “narrow gate” teaching of Matthew 7 and Luke 13, but a radicalization of that teaching: The way is not merely narrow, but humanly impassible and unthinkable, particularly for the rich.

Nautical rope?

The second challenge is somewhat more, ah, knotty. As far back as Cyril of Alexandria it has been argued that that “camel” is a misinterpretation or scribal error. In both Aramaic and Greek (respectively, Jesus’ language and the language of the New Testament) the word for camel is virtually identical to a word said to mean heavy ship’s rope or nautical cable.¹⁶

It must be acknowledged that this proposal does pass a few basic smell tests. Perhaps most importantly, the force of Jesus’ point is preserved either way: A heavy rope is no more going through the eye of a needle than a camel, so the seeming impossibility of Jesus’ saying isn’t lost. Second, the notion of trying to thread a needle with thick rope implicitly contrasts the rope with thread, mirroring the similar contrasts between a camel and a gnat (two living creatures of dramatically different sizes) and a wooden beam and a splinter (two dramatically different quantities of wood). Finally, it’s plausible that Jesus, who elsewhere talks about fishing nets and fishing for human beings, would find the image of ship’s rope suitable for the audiences he addressed.

It could even be argued that the very fact that Jesus elsewhere makes hyperbolic use of camel imagery (“swallowing a camel”), leading to my hopeful suggestion of the camel as Jesus’ go-to funny animal, lends support to the opposite conclusion: Perhaps the word meaning “rope” is the correct reading in this pericope, but knowledge of Jesus’ mention of camels in the other passage influenced copyists to read the needle’s eye passage as also referring to a camel!

On the other hand, a number of considerations weigh against the “rope” reading.

First and most important is the textual evidence. We can talk all day long about the plausibility of Jesus saying one thing or another, but at the end of the day we have to look at the manuscript evidence and ask: “What does the evidence tell us the evangelists actually wrote down, since that’s the only evidence we have for what Jesus said?”

Notably, while the “swallowing a camel” saying occurs only in Matthew, the “needle’s eye” saying occurs in all three Synoptic Gospels—and the overwhelming majority of manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all support the “camel” reading, with only a few late manuscripts attesting the “rope” reading. Granted, it’s a single vowel in both Greek and Aramaic, but that vowel matters. If “camel” is a textual corruption, one would almost be forced to conclude that the “corruption” occurred so early, and so influentially, in the propagation of Mark’s Gospel (perhaps in the autograph itself?) that both Matthew and Luke (which are dependent on Mark as a source) were corrupted from the outset. The greater likelihood is that the “rope” reading attests a later, “logical” attempt to make Jesus’ saying less seemingly ridiculous.¹⁷ It is largely due to the weight of textual evidence that modern translations are virtually unanimous in translating the word “camel.”¹⁸

Second is the same evidence from Jewish literature cited above regarding other “needle’s eye” references with elephants and so forth.¹⁹ Either images of this kind were part of an existing store of Hebrew idioms that Jesus drew on, or Jesus’ saying inspired similar sayings from Aramaic-speaking rabbis and Jewish writers who were at least as well qualified as Cyril to judge whether Jesus was talking about ropes or camels. Either way, extant Jewish needle’s-eye sayings tend to support the camel reading of Jesus’ saying.

Third, the superficial logic of Jesus implicitly contrasting thick rope with a thread founders in view of the application: The topic is not simply “tasks that are hard or impossible,” but “the difficulty of entering the kingdom of God,” and specifically the difficulty faced by a rich man seeking entrance into the kingdom. The rich man is not trying to get something else into the kingdom (e.g., his wealth); he aspires, however haplessly, to get himself into the kingdom. It is his own entrance that is impeded. The rich man is much more like a camel haplessly aspiring to pass through the eye of a needle than a (hypothetically implied!) needleworker haplessly trying to thread a needle with a length of heavy rope. As noted above, while the “needle’s eye” is not a gate, the “needle’s eye” saying is a radicalization of Jesus’ “narrow gate” teaching. It is travelers that are in view here. A camel is a traveler; a piece of rope is not.

Finally, it has been argued that the Greek and Aramaic words resembling “camel” but said to mean “rope” are of dubious validity. Not only does the Greek word read as “rope” appear nowhere else in the New Testament, it seems to be unattested anywhere prior to Cyril mentioning it—and subsequent mentions may be dependent on Cyril. In fact, it has been proposed that the word was “coined as an emendation” of this very saying of Jesus (perhaps by scribes on whose work Cyril was dependent, or even by Cyril himself)! In other words, it may be that Jesus’ saying about a rich man entering the kingdom being like a camel passing through a needle’s eye was so unpalatable that to support an alternate reading a new word was created—perhaps a far-fetched loan word, or a previously obscure or unlikely word given new life. Something similar may also be true of the Aramaic and Arabic words.

Humor with a point

Why do commentators who have no trouble swallowing Jesus’ extravagant quip about about gulping down camels balk at the similarly absurd language about a camel passing through a needle’s eye, so that both the camel and the needle’s eye are called into question? Is it perhaps partly because the first saying is directed against Pharisees, while the second is directed against the rich? Do we feel that “Pharisees” are fair game for Jesus’ harshest language—either because we identify them with hypocrisy and legalism, or else simply because they’re Jews? Are we more uncomfortable with Jesus’ harshness toward the rich, who are, after all, ourselves, both as we are and as we aspire to be?

Jesus’ hyperbolic camel sayings (we don’t have three, but we definitely have two!) may be humorous (along with the one about the wooden beam in one’s eye, among others)—but Jesus’ humor, at least as reported in the Gospels, always has a point, often an uncomfortably sharp one—as sharp as the part of the needle farthest from the eye! If we never feel the pointy end of Jesus’ words poking at us, we probably aren’t reading deeply or accurately enough.

1. Real exchange here at the Grey Havens during family evening devotions some four years ago—which, obviously, I did put on social media after prayers!

2. It must be noted that the use of “Pharisee” and “pharisaical” as pejorative terms denoting legalism and hypocrisy, based on Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees in the Gospels (especially in Matthew 23) and filtered through centuries of Christian antisemitism, is unhistorical and unjust. The New Testament reflects the polemical tensions between Christians and Jews at the time of its writing, and is not meant to offer a well-rounded portrait of various segments of the Jewish community, including the Pharisees. I will write more about this at some point.

3. All biblical citations are taken from the New American Bible, the translation used in the lectionary and proclaimed in Roman Rite Masses celebrated according to the current liturgical books.

4. The vividness of the conceit may have been underscored in Jesus’ original Aramaic words by a typically Hebrew bit of wordplay: The Aramaic word for “camel” is גָּמָל (gml, pronounced gamal in Hebrew, gamala or gamla in Aramaic), and the word translated “gnat” may have been גָּלמָ (glm, pronounced galma). Thus, “You strain out a galma, but gulp down a gamla!” (Hebrew gamal, Aramaic gamala, Greek καμηλών or kamelon, and English “camel” are all cognates—and the similarity of a number of related words across a number of languages is a significant complication in the topic explored in this piece.)

5. For a brilliant practical visualization of the “log in your eye”—amply playing up the humor potential of the saying—see this YouTube clip from the animated Jesus movie The Miracle Maker.

6. So far as I have been able to tell, alas, even the apocryphal Gospels offer no third example of a camel-saying ascribed to Jesus.

7. Just this Sunday, one of my adult children heard the Needle’s Eye gate interpretation in a homily at Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception Basilica in Washingon, DC. I wonder how many readers heard it this weekend?

8. In quoting this and other ancient sources in older translations available online, I have made small standardizations in punctuation and capitalization.

9. Anselm’s interpretation seems to be partially anticipated by a fragment of Jerome also in Aquinas, which, while not mentioning a gate called the Needle’s Eye, places Jesus’ words in a similar context:

According to this, no rich man can be saved. But if we read Isaiah, how the camels of Midian and Ephah came to Jerusalem with gifts and presents, and they who once were crooked and bowed down by the weight of their sins, enter the gates of Jerusalem, we shall see how these camels, to which the rich are likened when they have laid aside the heavy load of sins, and the distortion of their whole bodies, may then enter by that narrow and strait way that leads to life.

The reference to camels being “crooked and bowed down” is not supported by Isaiah 60:6 (“Caravans of camels shall cover you, dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; All from Sheba shall come bearing gold and frankincense, and heralding the praises of the LORD”).

It has also been claimed that another 11th-century source, a monk named Theophylact, supports the Needle’s Eye gate interpretation. This, though, seems to be an error. In fact, Theophylact mentions the other approach to softening Jesus’ saying, i.e., the claim that Jesus really referred, not to a camel, but to nautical rope.

10. Long after Anselm, a nineteenth-century travelogue claimed to identify a gate locally known as the Needle’s Eye, and apparently less than scrupulous tour guides may point out a gate alleged to be the one Jesus was talking about. (I’ve also heard of tour guides pointing out a particular inn as the one used by the Good Samaritan!) It seems there is also an Orthodox church that claims possession of the gate in question.

11. Note how Augustine, with his gnat reference, implicitly links Jesus’ two camel-sayings!

12. Critics of the Needle’s Eye gate interpretation sometimes overstate their case by protesting that camels cannot crawl on their knees. In fact, on the evidence of video available via YouTube, camels can be made to crawl both backwards and forwards on their front knees, significantly lowering their profile.

13. Note, by the way, that according to Jesus it is not only the rich who have a hard time entering the kingdom: In the midst of this pericope Jesus says simply, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!” For anyone, then, entering the kingdom is “hard”—that is, seemingly impossible—though clearly Jesus intends to present wealth as a special challenge or obstacle. Perhaps for a poor man it is more like a goat or a chicken trying to pass through the eye of a needle, or even Augustine’s gnat—still seemingly impossible, though not for God.

14. The meaning of the bracketed word is difficult; for some background, see Lachs, Samuel Tobias, A Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament (KTAV Publishing, 1987), 332, n. 9. Incidentally, this image of a miraculously expanding needle’s eye appears also in the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Andrew (Peter repeats this miracle a number of times):

Then [Peter] fixed the needle in the ground, and cried out with a loud voice, saying: In the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, I order you, O camel, to go through the eye of the needle. Then the eye of the needle was opened like a gate, and the camel went through it, and all the multitude saw it.

15. It can be argued that the very notion of a “Needle’s Eye gate” seems to imply that the phrase already had that idiomatic sense!

16. Some discussion via Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange: In Aramaic, the word for camel, גָּמָל (gml or gamla), is apparently written identically to an almost identically pronounced word meaning ship’s rope or nautical cable. (Aramaic, like Hebrew, has no written vowels, and the slight difference in vowel pronunciation might have been obscured by Jesus’ Galilean accent.) Likewise in Greek the word for camel, κάμηλον (kamelon) is almost identical to κάμιλον (kamilon), reportedly meaning nautical rope. The same issue crops up in Arabic in a passage in the Quran that also talks about a camel (or possibly a rope) passing through a needle’s eye!

17. In textual criticism it is widely accepted that scribes are more likely to try to resolve difficulties in the text than to introduce them, and so, all things being equal, the more difficult reading is to be preferred to the less difficult one. Lectio difficilior potior: “the more difficult reading is the stronger.” 

18. Not completely unanimous, of course! The Lamsa Bible, a 1933 translation based on the Aramaic Syriac Peshitta texts of the Old and New Testaments, depicts Jesus talking about “a rope” going through the eye of a needle. (Yet the Aramaic Bible in Plain English, a 2010 translation also based on the Peshitta texts, uses “camel.”) Among older works, there’s the eighteenth-century New Testament translation of the English Presbyterian minister Daniel Mace, who used “cable.”

19. The Quranic text about the camel and the needle’s eye is less helpful here because the Arabic word for “camel” is said to be subject to the same ambiguous reading as the Aramaic word.