All those years I believed it

I discovered recently that something I have always believed is actually not true. There has never been a gate in Jerusalem known as the “Eye of the Needle” through which a camel can only crawl without baggage… no matter how many Western tourists ask to be shown it!

Puzzled? Let me explain. In Matthew 19:24, Jesus famously tells a rich man, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”.

“Oh dear,” say the rich Christians, wondering how to get round this one. Saturday Night Live, Season 22, Episode 3 offers one of the funniest schemes – truly inspired. There are many others. But it’s basically quite difficult to get a lumbering desert beast through a hole barely large enough for one of its nostril hairs. Trust me on this.

Did Jesus really mean us to make all this fuss? Did he really mean what we call “heaven” when he referred to the “Kingdom of God” anyway? Does he really have a thing against rich people? Or is he possibly just using an extreme hyperbole to debunk the common belief at the time that riches were a sign of God’s blessing? Maybe he’s just saying “look, it’s impossible for anyone to find the kingdom of God themselves … yes, even impossible for those rich people that you think must have it all together.”

At least, that’s what it says on the web pages I looked at (like eyeoftheneedle.net for example), and it seems to make sense to me.

One thing’s for sure – I bet Jesus’ listeners had no clue how much agonising and theorising this simple sentence would cause over two millennia later.