From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 17:36:43 EDT
bivalve wrote:
>
> Calvin preferred the reading rope to camel, but most modern commentators seem to agree that camel is the correct reading. Neither one fits through a needle.
If I may quibble: An expert on textual criticism may correct me but there is no
"reading" /kamilon/ = "rope" rather than /kamelos/ = "camel". It is instead a "textual
emendation" - i.e., a guess at what the text might originally have been. That is a
legitimate procedure when the text we have is in such disarray that it doesn't make any
sense - as is the case in some places in the OT, like parts of Job. But otherwise it's
not appropriate.
& here's something I hadn't noticed before. On looking up /kamilos/ in my
antique (1843!) Liddell-Scott, I find this note:
"/a rope/: but probably invented merely to explain away the well-known passage
in the N.T., /for a camel to go through the eye of a needle/, etc., where a rope might
seem to us a more prob. image: but the Arabs have a proverb, /like an elephant going
through a needle's eye/; and /to swallow a camel/ occurs in N.T.; so that this is
needless."
But this was written before the discovery of a lot of the koine documents so
don't rely on it without checking some newer reference.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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