The Eye of the Needle

There are sayings of Jesus that the church has spent centuries trying to soften. Love your enemies. Sell what you have and give to the poor. He who is not against us is for us. And — high on the list — the one about the camel.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. (Mark 10:25, NIV)

It’s one of the most famous lines in the Gospels. It shows up in Mark, in Matthew, and in Luke — all three Synoptic Gospels — which means it survived three independent paths into the written record. The early church didn’t lose it or quietly drop it. They preserved it carefully, in triplicate. And then they spent the next two thousand years trying to figure out what to do with it.

There’s a good reason for the trouble. In English, the saying lands as an impossibility. A camel — the largest land animal most Jewish people in first-century Palestine had ever seen — cannot possibly fit through the tiny hole in the back end of a sewing needle. It’s absurd. It’s funny in the dark way that Jesus is sometimes funny. And it appears to be saying that a rich person cannot enter the kingdom of God at all. The disciples, in the very next verse, hear it exactly that way. Who then can be saved? they ask, exceedingly amazed. They understood that Jesus had just shut a door. The English makes us hear what they heard.

But somewhere along the way — and we can almost pinpoint the year — the church decided that maybe Jesus hadn’t actually said something that hard. Maybe there was another way to read it.

The most famous attempt to soften the saying is one you’ve probably heard from a pulpit. It goes like this: in the wall of ancient Jerusalem, there was a small gate, just big enough for a person to walk through, called the eye of the needle. When the big city gates closed at night, this little gate stayed open for late travelers. A camel could pass through it, but only if the camel knelt down and had all its baggage removed first. So when Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, he wasn’t talking about an absolute impossibility. He was using a vivid local image. A rich man, like a loaded camel, can still enter the kingdom — but only if he kneels and unloads what he’s carrying.

It’s a beautiful sermon. The image is moving. The application is practical. The only problem with it is that it isn’t true.

There’s no archaeological evidence that any such gate ever existed in the wall of Jerusalem. The known gates of the ancient city — the Sheep Gate, the Fish Gate, the Dung Gate, the Water Gate, the Golden Gate — are all attested in scripture and in early Jewish writings. None of them is called the eye of the needle, or anything close to it. The Jewish historian Josephus, who described Jerusalem in painstaking detail, never mentions such a gate. The rabbis who wrote the Mishnah and the Talmud, who recorded countless small details of Jerusalem’s topography, never mention it. The early church fathers, who wrote extensively about the Holy City — Jerome, Origen, Eusebius — never mention it.

The earliest known reference to the eye of the needle as a gate in Jerusalem comes from a short marginal note attributed to Anselm of Canterbury, the English archbishop who lived in the eleventh century. The note is preserved in a thirteenth-century commentary compilation by Thomas Aquinas called the Catena Aurea. That’s roughly a thousand years after Jesus stood in Galilee and said the words. The gate explanation is medieval. It’s exactly what it looks like — a tradition that grew up in the Latin West, in the second millennium, to make a hard saying of Jesus easier to live with. There’s a recent short study by the New Testament scholar Agnieszka Ziemińska, published in New Testament Studies in 2022, that traces the gate legend back through the medieval commentators — correcting the common assumption that it began with the eleventh-century commentator Theophylact, and pointing instead to the gloss attributed to Anselm — and treats it throughout as exactly that: a legend, with no first-century gate by that name behind it.

There’s a second, slightly older attempt to soften the saying that turns on a single Greek letter. The Greek word for camel is kamēlos (κάμηλος). There’s a related Greek word, kamilos (κάμιλος), that means rope — specifically the kind of thick ship’s cable used by sailors to bind anchors. The two words differ by a single vowel. And in the Greek of the first century, the vowels eta (η) and iota (ι) had come to sound nearly identical — a phenomenon that linguists call iotacism. Kamēlos and kamilos were homophones. To the ear, they sounded the same. So — the argument goes — perhaps a scribe somewhere in the early manuscript tradition heard rope and wrote camel, and the misreading propagated everywhere afterward. It is easier for a rope to go through the eye of a needle is still difficult, but it’s at least a comparison of kinds: a thin thing trying to fit through a thinner hole. Not the absurdity of a half-ton dromedary squeezing through a sewing needle.

This reading was suggested in the fifth century by Cyril of Alexandria, one of the more influential bishops of the early church, and a handful of late Greek manuscripts actually read kamilon (rope) instead of kamēlon (camel). But the textual evidence is overwhelming: the oldest and best manuscripts of all three Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — read kamēlos, camel. Cyril’s suggestion is a guess, not a manuscript reading, and the variant readings that match it are late and few. Modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament unanimously print camel. The textual evidence is settled.

There’s one more layer worth mentioning, briefly. Jesus most likely spoke this saying in Aramaic, not Greek. Some scholars have proposed that the Aramaic word gamla (גמלא), which usually means camel, can also mean rope in certain contexts — the kind of thick rope made by twisting camel hair together — and that an Aramaic-original wordplay sits underneath the Greek. This is a real possibility, and the lexicographer Mar Bahlul, in the tenth century, lists gamla as a ship’s cable. But the case isn’t strong enough to overturn the Greek text. The Greek of all three Gospels, in the oldest manuscripts, says camel. Whatever the Aramaic underneath may have been doing, the Gospel writers — who knew first-century Aramaic far better than we do — translated it camel.

So we’re back where we started. The gate doesn’t exist. The rope reading isn’t in the best manuscripts. The Aramaic wordplay is interesting but not load-bearing. Whatever softening we wanted to do to Jesus’s saying, the text resists it. The camel is a camel. The needle is a needle. And the comparison is exactly the one it appears to be.

Which means it’s time to ask the better question. What was Jesus actually doing when he said this?

To get there, we have to go to the scene. Mark 10 is one of the most famous chapters in the Gospel of Mark, and the camel saying doesn’t stand alone — it’s the climax of a longer conversation between Jesus and a man we’ve come to call the rich young ruler, though that composite name comes from comparing the three Gospel accounts: Mark calls him simply a man, Matthew adds that he was young, and Luke calls him a certain ruler. Combine them and you get the figure most Christians know.

The man comes to Jesus and asks the big question. Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He’s done well in life. He’s kept the commandments. He’s been honest, faithful, respectful of his parents. He is — by every external measure — a good man, a religiously serious man, and a prosperous man. Mark’s account tells us that Jesus, looking at him, loved him. And then Jesus, who loved him, tells him a hard thing. One thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. The man’s face falls. He goes away sad, because — Mark tells us — he had great wealth.

Jesus turns to the disciples and says something that, in their ears, lands as a major upheaval of everything they’d been taught. How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. The disciples are amazed — that’s Mark’s word, thambeō, a verb meaning to be astounded, shocked, knocked sideways. Jesus repeats it. Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God. And then comes the camel.

Why are the disciples shocked? Because in the world they grew up in, wealth was a sign of God’s favor. The book of Deuteronomy had promised material blessing to those who obeyed God’s covenant. The Wisdom literature — Proverbs especially — connected prosperity with righteousness. The Pharisees, in many strands of first-century Judaism, taught that wealth was evidence of God’s good pleasure. If a wealthy man, who has kept the commandments, who is by every visible measure a faithful Jew, cannot easily enter the kingdom of God — then who can? That’s the disciples’ panicked question in the next verse: Who then can be saved?

This isn’t the bewilderment of people who’ve just heard a vague spiritual challenge. It’s the bewilderment of people whose entire framework for reading divine favor has just been turned upside down. Jesus has said that the people their tradition would have placed at the front of the line for the kingdom are actually at the back. He’s said that prosperity isn’t what they thought it was. He’s said that the most obvious candidates for God’s favor are, in fact, the ones for whom entry will be hardest.

The Presbyterian missionary scholar Kenneth Bailey, who spent forty years living and teaching in seminaries in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus — and who reread the parables and sayings of Jesus through the lens of traditional Middle Eastern village culture in his major work Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes — argued that Jesus’s teaching method was deeply shaped by a particular Jewish and Middle Eastern rhetorical instinct. The rabbis taught with hyperbole. They reached for the most extreme, the most absurd, the most visually arresting comparison they could make, in order to break their audience out of comfortable assumptions and force them to see something they’d stopped seeing. A camel through the eye of a needle is exactly that move. It isn’t a soft saying with a clever sermon application embedded in it. It’s a deliberately absurd image meant to make the disciples — and the man who had just walked away, and us — feel the impossibility in our chests.

And the rabbis liked this kind of language so much that there are near-parallels in the Talmud. In the tractate Berakhot, the rabbi Rava explains why dreams reflect the dreamer’s waking thoughts rather than random impossibilities: a person is never shown in a dream a palm tree of gold, nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle. In another tractate, Bava Metzia, one rabbi teases another over a particularly convoluted argument: Perhaps you are from Pumbedita, where they make an elephant pass through the eye of a needle. The image was a stock idiom of Jewish hyperbolic teaching — the impossibility of impossibilities. The Babylonian Jews reached for elephant. The Galilean Jews — including Jesus — reached for camel. The point in both cases is the same. It cannot be done. Not by ordinary means.

But here is where the saying turns. Right after the disciples ask who then can be saved, Jesus looks at them and says one of the most consequential sentences in the Gospels:

With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God. (Mark 10:27, NIV)

The camel can never go through the eye of the needle. Not by being unloaded. Not by kneeling down. Not by being a thinner kind of rope. The saying isn’t a sermon illustration about humility, or a homily about generosity, or a metaphor for spiritual minimalism, even though the rich young ruler had just been told to go sell everything. The saying is a deliberate, mountain-sized impossibility, placed in front of the disciples specifically so that Jesus can give the answer to the impossibility. Salvation, for anyone — rich or poor, prosperous or destitute — is something only God can do. The impossibility of the camel is the setup for the only answer that matters. All things are possible with God.

Reading this yourself

Try this the next time you come to Mark 10. Slow down before verse 25. Sit with the rich man’s face falling. Sit with the disciples’ shock — amazed in verse 24, then exceedingly amazed in verse 26, two different Greek words for astonishment bracketing the camel saying because Mark wants you to feel how stunned they were. Then read the camel line at its full strength. Don’t soften it. Don’t reach for the gate that doesn’t exist. Don’t reach for the rope that the manuscripts don’t support. Let it be what it is — the most extreme image Jesus could think of, used to make the most extreme point he was trying to make. Then read verse 27 slowly. All things are possible with God. Notice that the answer to the impossibility isn’t a smaller impossibility. The answer is the same God who made the universe, and who can also do what humans cannot.

For a thousand years the church has tried to make this saying easier. The gate explanation is medieval. The rope variant is fifth-century. The Aramaic suggestions are modern. Each generation has reached for some way to bring the camel down to size. And every time, the text has resisted. The Greek manuscripts say camel. All three Synoptic Gospel writers preserved it. The disciples, in the original scene, heard exactly what we hear in English — an impossibility — and they were knocked sideways by it. They had no gate to fall back on. They had no rope variant to soften the blow. They asked the only honest question the saying leaves you with: Who then can be saved? And Jesus answered it. With man, this is impossible. The English camel through the eye of a needle isn’t a softened image waiting for a clever historical reading. It is what Jesus said. The deepest reading is the simplest one. The camel cannot go through the needle. The rich cannot save themselves. None of us can. But God can — and that, in the end, is what the saying is for.