A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle, and Other Wild Tales of Translation (2018) | Hacker News Reader

A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle, and Other Wild Tales of Translation (2018)

stantlitore.com

21 pointsEndXA10 comments

Here's a detailed discussion on the history starting with "There’s no good evidence that kamilos — supposedly meaning ‘rope’ — was ever even a real word in ancient Greek.": https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html

And of course if you are wealthy then putting a camel through the eye of a needle isn't hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461089

The "camel means rope" story, while cute and not implausible, is basically a guess. All the earliest available sources say "camel" - there is no actual evidence of this mistake beyond speculation (though it is admittedly an ancient speculation, as early as Cyril of Alexandria). The Wikipedia page has a much more balanced summary than this page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle

How much time is there between the oldest source and when it was originally written?

Both the original writing, and the surviving manuscripts, have uncertainty bounds of decades in their dates. The oldest physical pages we still have come from the years 100-200 or so. And assuming that a description of an event can't be written before the event happened (a touchy subject in this case), then the original writing of the Gospels must have been after the start of the First Jewish-Roman War in the year 66. So the gap between the writing and our extant sources could be pretty short, or could be over a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript#Earliest_e...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Composition

A new Norwegian translation of the Bible was just released, and a Catholic bishop was invited to discuss the new translation. When he started to describe how phonetic similarities of words in the old Greek texts were important for how verses should be read and understood, I really got to appreciate the shortcomings of translating this kind of texts

I don’t know the background of the author but it reads like Christian apologetics. Understanding language is important but this entire post softens the accepted point to something more easily swallowed.

Was the Bible sexist? Or homophobic? Or whatever? Well, if you buy this persons’s book you can read their opinion of translations (which really are translations of translations of…) that make it not so. Surely god, of all people, could prevent mistranslations.

In reality, the “Word of God” was “divinely inspired” and “so easy a child can understand it”. If it says something terrible, that’s probably because it actually does. If it takes ten years of religous studies to truly understand that god wasn’t a racist genocidal maniac, then it’s also not easily understood by a child.

> I don’t know the background of the author but it reads like Christian apologetics. Understanding language is important but this entire post softens the accepted point to something more easily swallowed.

I'm not a Christian, but my impression is that the author was disapproving of Christians who use certain translations of the Bible as an excuse to be homophobic or misogynistic. I don't know how Christian community members and Christian religious leaders decide which translations to use, but in the end the Bible is one medium for Christians to teach lessons. Other media include church events, discussion about what the Bible's text means, and discussion about what individual community members believe.

> In reality, the “Word of God” was “divinely inspired” and “so easy a child can understand it”.

"divinely inspired" is meaningless. As for "so easy a child can understand it", what's your basis for saying so? Having listened to a few informal devotionals, I'm very glad that the leaders of the devotionals complemented the actual Bible verses with simplified explanations of the verses (and sometimes relevant stories from their real lives).

Yeah I clearly read this the wrong way. That is my bad.

> "divinely inspired" is meaningless. As for "so easy a child can understand it", what's your basis for saying so?

It’s been a minute but “so easy a child can understand it” is out of the New Testament.

The other stuff - I heard it growing up religious. It’s pretty common language you hear from pastors, etc. At least in the world I was forced to live in.

Thank you for your perspective. Honestly. Not snarky.

> It’s been a minute but “so easy a child can understand it” is out of the New Testament.

> The other stuff - I heard it growing up religious. It’s pretty common language you hear from pastors, etc.

Might have been the Old Testament, but I did learn something new. Psalms 119:130 in the American Standard Version [1]:

> The opening of thy words giveth light;

> It giveth understanding unto the simple.

(Other translations say "childlike" instead of or in addition to "simple" [2].) In my previous comment, I thought that the average child would need someone to explain Bible verses in simpler terms, but I was probably wrong to think so. A child who doesn't understand all of the formal words in the average will still grasp the context clues enough to understand the lessons that the words teach. Whether the word "camel" was a mistranslation of "rope", a child will still understand that rich people who go to heaven will leave behind their material possessions.

On a separate note, I shouldn't have written something as vague (or even meaningless) as

> "divinely inspired" is meaningless.

in my previous comment. What I should have written was: the extent to which the Bible is "divinely inspired" has little to do with how easy-to-understand the Bible is, unless by "divinely inspired" you meant that God intended for the Bible to be easy to understand.

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalms+119%3A13...

[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Psalm%20119:130

You have two options:

1- You teach people critical thinking and how to read the Bible within the historical context.

2- You assume a lot of guess work as facts that support your already pre-conceived opinions and hide the fact that you are possibly wrong.

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