And while on the subject of James Berger's book The Moses Stone, can we lay to rest another myth? One of Berger's characters debunks the biblical reference to rich men, the Kingdom of Heaven, camels and the eye of a needle by claiming that in the King James Bible the translators had misread the Greek for "rope" for the Greek for "camel".
It is a nice conceit, were it not for even earlier texts, the Aramaic ones, which have not a camel, but an elephant, the likelihood of whose ability to pass through the eye of a needle is considered to be of the same order as that of a rich man's to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And since elephants were common enough in the lands where Aramaic was the lingua franca, but pretty rare in the Greek colonies, where the camel was about the biggest beast likely to be encountered, isn't it likely, with the gentle application of Occam's Razor, that the King James Bible has the proper translation of this curious but powerful metaphor?
And here, m'lud, I rest my case.
There is a strong suspicion too that the alleged Greek word for rope (kami:los) was invented by commentators purely to explain this passage away as a confusion with the word kame:los (camel), for whilst there are various Greek words for "rope", this particular one, somewhat coincidentally, has never been seen in the wild.
ReplyDeleteThe texts have kame:los, so if there were a mistake it was made centuries before the A.V. saw was produced.
Thanks for that, WJ
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