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In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for camel is gamlo (ܓܐܡܠܐ) while the word for rope is gamla (ܓܐܡܠܥ). Mixing these up would be an easy mistake to

In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for camel is gamlo (ܓܐܡܠܐ) while the word for rope is gamla (ܓܐܡܠܥ). Mixing these up would be an easy mistake to make. Matthew and Luke both took some info from Mark but also took some info from the Q source and their own sources. Since all three have this same wording, it is likely the error came through Mark.

re 3y ago
> In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for camel is gamlo (ܓܐܡܠܐ) while the word for rope is gamla (ܓܐܡܠܥ). The blog author briefly references this Aramaic theory in his post and says that it has been similarly debunked, linking to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf0Fm8aVApk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf0Fm8aVApk The supposed Aramaic word for rope doesn't appear in any sources until the 10th century CE and is derived at that time from the same Cyril origin.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  I have to admit that the fact that various commentators suggest THREE different languages happen to have words for camel and rope that sound almost the same does rather bolster the case being made here. Someone want to suggest a seafaring rope known as kyummel or something?
  - KMag 3y ago
    First of all, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, English, etc. all have very similar words for camel/gimel/gamal/etc. (The Greek letter Gamma and the Hebrew/Phoenician letter Gimel derive from a drawing of a camel's head. Though, it's probably originally derives from a drawing of a boomerang-like hunting stick with a rhyming name in Demotic, and "throwing-stick" probably got switched to "camel" when the Phoenicians adapted the Demotic alphabet.) The word for camel got borrowed pretty readily as cultures came into contact with camels. It wouldn't be at all unusual for all three languages to have a very similar rare word for rope if the word at least originally meant a (rarely made) type of rope made of camel's hair. A couple decades ago, I was told that this saying was an intentional play on words between an Aramaic word for a rope made of camel's hair rhyming with the Aramaic word for camel, to make the saying more memorable. It's a bit sad to hear it was probably made up rather than clever word play.
    - Adverblessly 3y ago
      Just looking it up online as I have no personal knowledge here, the Hebrew word for rope, חבל (hevel, pronounced as ḥ or χ) apparently has shared roots with Arabic, Syriac, Akkadian and Ugaritic that all have similar sounding words and the current guess it that there was a proto-semitic word like "ḥabl" and of course none of those sound like camel or gamal, so you can at least strike Hebrew and Arabic from the list of potential sources of origin.
      - KMag 3y ago
        That would be the common word for rope. The claim isn't that it's the ordinary word for rope, but rather a more rare word for rope, maybe for a particular type of rope made of camel hair. Others here have posted the Aramaic word in question.
        angiosperm 3y ago
        And, demonstrated that it too was fabricated.
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      Prepare yourself: the entire canon was equally made up from whole cloth, right from the beginning. The rope/camel line is neither more nor less made-up than the rest; it was just made up a bit later. Notice though that the anonymous author of "John" appears to have tried to scrub it in the early/mid second century. It was apparently already a troublesome image by that time.
      - KMag 3y ago
        > Prepare yourself: the entire canon was equally made up from whole cloth, right from the beginning. The fainting hypothesis seems much more likely than an intentional fraud. Given the original leaders initially successfully scattered to the wind, then later returned to Jerusalem, and continued to travel the empire despite being slowly hunted down, tortured and executed by the Roman government over the next few decades, it seems they genuinely believed they were serving some grand purpose beyond themselves. They were clearly mobile, and word clearly got around they were being hunted. It would have been a much easier life for any of them to settle and hide in any one of scattered corners of the empire they visited rather than attempting to start churches there. Especially after word got 'round that the first few had been tortured and executed, I'd expect any intentional fraudsters to just melt away into the backwater corners of the empire. If they were going to make things up, you'd think they'd have made at least one of the disciples brave and smart. (To a man, they all come across as more than a bit dense and cowardly.) At a minimum, you'd think they would have made the first pope (Cephas/Peter) much less foolishly impulsive, and removed the several incidents where he tried to correct Jesus. If you were making it up from whole cloth, you'd also have at least one of the disciples faithfully hang out at the tomb waiting for the resurrection, rather than having a group of women (considered hysterical unreliable witnesses) be the ones to discover the resurrection. Failing that, you'd expect at least one of the disciples to say "ah, of course" to the women, rather than (to a man) accuse them of hallucination. Instead, with the official story, the one good leader is gone from the earth just as the story is getting going, and the remaining leaders are all poor choices. A more plausible explanation is that one of the many charismatic anti-establishment nomadic preachers of the day assembled a ragtag bunch of illiterate fishermen, outcast Roman collaborators, etc. He starts to get some fame, it goes to his head and he gets a bit too anti-establishment, especially anti-priest. The priests convince the occupying Romans that they better execute him for sedition before he raises a rebel army. After his arrest and execution, his ragtag bunch flee Jerusalem and scatter. It turns out that against one-in-a-million odds, this one guy faints and survives crucifixion, wakes up a few days later, and wanders off to find his followers. The women left behind to do the grunge work discover the empty tomb, word gets 'round the small community, and the disciples trickle back into Jerusalem. The illiterate former cowards set out spreading the message. The leader eventually succumbs to his wounds a few weeks or months later, but his followers rationalize this just as his way of going back to heaven after making his point by coming back from crucifixion. They hide away the body to protect it from the Romans as they patiently await his second resurrection. (Or maybe the leader counted his blessings having survived execution and himself melted away into the backwaters of the empire without telling anyone.) As it was taking longer than they expected for Jesus to come back a second time, they later started a collection of sayings in the original Aramaic (the Q document hypothesis). At some point, a scribe marginally literate in Koine Greek tooks down Mark's version of events. Later on, other scribes working from these sources, passed oral history, and perhaps direct access to the disciples, wrote down a few more histories in Koine Greek. At some point, a physician (perhaps a freed slave, formerly belonging to a relative of Paul's) traveling with Paul tried to collect a proper history of events, citing names and locations of eyewitnesses. Paul makes note of the portions of his letters that he's writing out with his own hand rather than dictating to a Greek-literate scribe. So, it seems his audience expected even most of his writings to be through a scribe rather than directly written by him, despite him being literate in Greek. Presumably early Christians would have similarly been un-surprised that scribes were involved in writing Greek accounts for illiterate Aramaic-speaking fishermen. In any case, a mildly competent fraudster would have set himself or a collaborator up as the wise and brave hero, and would have vanished when it became clear that at best the leaders were going to spend decades on the run with only the clothes on their backs. Being mistaken about what they witnessed seems much more likely than an intentional fraud.
m463 3y ago
visually pretty similar. Thank goodness we live in the future with typesetting and even monospaced fonts so rn and m don't look similar.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Sometimes monospace can make it worse: early in my iOS work, I leaned on the alt key without (initially) realising, and got very confused by compiler errors caused by a "–" where it should have been a "-".
- Tao3300 3y ago
  A carnel through the eye of a needle. Might be a pastry. Might be part of a battlement.
Jedd 3y ago
I think there's enough evidence to suggest that whoever the people that wrote Matthew and Luke were, they were capable of introducing their own errors, along with embellishments, from their source material. Given they wrote in Koine, and exhibit some ignorance of the geography of the area, and almost definitely never met anyone that met Jesus, it's reasonable to assume no spoken Aramaic accounts were part of their source material.
- timbit42 3y ago
  Sure, but would they all make the same error? Either there was no error or they all inherited it from another source or Matthew and Luke inherited it from Mark. There is some evidence in Matthew that it could have originally been written in Aramaic.
  - Jedd 3y ago
    I thought it was fairly non-contentious [0] that the authors of Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily (almost exclusively) from the author of Mark's work, along with this unknown source (usually referred to as Q). It seems fairly reasonable then to assume it was a literary device made by the author of Mark - his writing is actually pretty good as far as allegory goes - that was subsequently lifted near verbatim by the later two authors. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcan_priority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcan_priority
    - timbit42 3y ago
      The parts Matthew and Luke didn't get from Mark, but match, are considered to be from Q. There are some parts of Matthew and Luke that neither come from Mark nor Q so they each also have one or more other sources unique to themselves.
      - Jedd 3y ago
        > There are some parts of Matthew and Luke that neither come from Mark nor Q so they each also have one or more other sources unique to themselves. Given that we know nothing about the provenance or contents of 'Q' - it's lost to time, and its hypothetical existence is effectively intuited by some researches - I do not understand how we can identify the set of things 'not in Q' (or indeed 'in Q'). I'd also note that there's zero evidence to suggest the unknown authors of Matthew and Luke had other sources - there's more evidence to suggest they were simply making stuff up.
xp84 3y ago
UsefulCharts, is that you? (Kidding, but it also wouldn’t be that shocking)
- timbit42 3y ago
  No, but I'm subscribed.
trhway 3y ago
I just googled, and the things are even less clearer - looks like it isn't just a rope, it specifically means thick rope made out of camel hair.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Note that light googling is very likely to reach the same problem as the article shows about Cyril: varied sources that are actually all based on a single original unreliable source.
angiosperm 3y ago
To use the expression "the language Jesus spoke" is to imply that a Jesus actually existed and said things quoted. But the best current scholarship today demonstrates persuasively that no walking, talking Jesus ever existed (never mind was executed extra-judicially). If any did, nothing he said found its way into the New Testament. Certainly, neither Paul writing in the 50s, nor the Roman church elders who wrote 1 Clements in the 60s had heard of a Jesus ever saying anything noteworthy, despite that backup from that quarter would have enormously eased their own arguments. The anonymous author of "Mark" writing in the 70s evidently confabulated a Jesus to mouth Paul's opinions (as found in his letters) to silence quarrelsome opposition. Amazingly, "Mark" seems to have had little more than Paul to draw on, even then. Every scrap else written down seems to have been torched by his time. It is particularly interesting that (the anonymous forger of the book of) "John" chose to scrub the "camel" line from his personal canon. There is not so much as a hint of actual evidence that there was ever any such thing as a Q source, nor M, L, or J; nor any "oral traditions". All are figments of the bubbling "biblical scholar" imagination. The dozens of other gospels left out of the canon, and the even more numerous forged Pauline letters, a few adopted as canon, illustrate how wholesale fabrication was the normal mode of literary production in the early Church. What the anonymous authors of "Matthew" wrote not found in "Mark", of "Luke" that wasn't in either, and of "John" that wasn't in any, is very evidently their personal opinions on what their private Jesuses should have said. ("John" even invented from whole cloth an entire disciple, Lazarus, as his own Jesus's favorite that the other gospels have as at most a wholly hypothetical figure.) If you are curious about the scholarship, you could start at "Why Invent the Jesus" on YT. Literally none of it has even been replied to, never mind refuted, in any peer-reviewed medium.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Why would someone refute a kooky YouTube video in a peer reviewed medium? This does not seem like a good proof of the factual nature of the YouTube kook. There’s a guy at the end of my street who lives in a culvert and screams obscenities. I never saw him refuted in JAMA, though, so I guess by your logic he must be right? No opinion on whether you’re right about Jesus or the Bible; just saying you might want to think about your yardstick.

re 3y ago

> In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for camel is gamlo (ܓܐܡܠܐ) while the word for rope is gamla (ܓܐܡܠܥ). The blog author briefly references this Aramaic theory in his post and says that it has been similarly debunked, linking to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf0Fm8aVApk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf0Fm8aVApk The supposed Aramaic word for rope doesn't appear in any sources until the 10th century CE and is derived at that time from the same Cyril origin.

emodendroket 3y ago
I have to admit that the fact that various commentators suggest THREE different languages happen to have words for camel and rope that sound almost the same does rather bolster the case being made here. Someone want to suggest a seafaring rope known as kyummel or something?
- KMag 3y ago
  First of all, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, English, etc. all have very similar words for camel/gimel/gamal/etc. (The Greek letter Gamma and the Hebrew/Phoenician letter Gimel derive from a drawing of a camel's head. Though, it's probably originally derives from a drawing of a boomerang-like hunting stick with a rhyming name in Demotic, and "throwing-stick" probably got switched to "camel" when the Phoenicians adapted the Demotic alphabet.) The word for camel got borrowed pretty readily as cultures came into contact with camels. It wouldn't be at all unusual for all three languages to have a very similar rare word for rope if the word at least originally meant a (rarely made) type of rope made of camel's hair. A couple decades ago, I was told that this saying was an intentional play on words between an Aramaic word for a rope made of camel's hair rhyming with the Aramaic word for camel, to make the saying more memorable. It's a bit sad to hear it was probably made up rather than clever word play.
  - Adverblessly 3y ago
    Just looking it up online as I have no personal knowledge here, the Hebrew word for rope, חבל (hevel, pronounced as ḥ or χ) apparently has shared roots with Arabic, Syriac, Akkadian and Ugaritic that all have similar sounding words and the current guess it that there was a proto-semitic word like "ḥabl" and of course none of those sound like camel or gamal, so you can at least strike Hebrew and Arabic from the list of potential sources of origin.
    - KMag 3y ago
      That would be the common word for rope. The claim isn't that it's the ordinary word for rope, but rather a more rare word for rope, maybe for a particular type of rope made of camel hair. Others here have posted the Aramaic word in question.
      - angiosperm 3y ago
        And, demonstrated that it too was fabricated.
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    Prepare yourself: the entire canon was equally made up from whole cloth, right from the beginning. The rope/camel line is neither more nor less made-up than the rest; it was just made up a bit later. Notice though that the anonymous author of "John" appears to have tried to scrub it in the early/mid second century. It was apparently already a troublesome image by that time.
    - KMag 3y ago
      > Prepare yourself: the entire canon was equally made up from whole cloth, right from the beginning. The fainting hypothesis seems much more likely than an intentional fraud. Given the original leaders initially successfully scattered to the wind, then later returned to Jerusalem, and continued to travel the empire despite being slowly hunted down, tortured and executed by the Roman government over the next few decades, it seems they genuinely believed they were serving some grand purpose beyond themselves. They were clearly mobile, and word clearly got around they were being hunted. It would have been a much easier life for any of them to settle and hide in any one of scattered corners of the empire they visited rather than attempting to start churches there. Especially after word got 'round that the first few had been tortured and executed, I'd expect any intentional fraudsters to just melt away into the backwater corners of the empire. If they were going to make things up, you'd think they'd have made at least one of the disciples brave and smart. (To a man, they all come across as more than a bit dense and cowardly.) At a minimum, you'd think they would have made the first pope (Cephas/Peter) much less foolishly impulsive, and removed the several incidents where he tried to correct Jesus. If you were making it up from whole cloth, you'd also have at least one of the disciples faithfully hang out at the tomb waiting for the resurrection, rather than having a group of women (considered hysterical unreliable witnesses) be the ones to discover the resurrection. Failing that, you'd expect at least one of the disciples to say "ah, of course" to the women, rather than (to a man) accuse them of hallucination. Instead, with the official story, the one good leader is gone from the earth just as the story is getting going, and the remaining leaders are all poor choices. A more plausible explanation is that one of the many charismatic anti-establishment nomadic preachers of the day assembled a ragtag bunch of illiterate fishermen, outcast Roman collaborators, etc. He starts to get some fame, it goes to his head and he gets a bit too anti-establishment, especially anti-priest. The priests convince the occupying Romans that they better execute him for sedition before he raises a rebel army. After his arrest and execution, his ragtag bunch flee Jerusalem and scatter. It turns out that against one-in-a-million odds, this one guy faints and survives crucifixion, wakes up a few days later, and wanders off to find his followers. The women left behind to do the grunge work discover the empty tomb, word gets 'round the small community, and the disciples trickle back into Jerusalem. The illiterate former cowards set out spreading the message. The leader eventually succumbs to his wounds a few weeks or months later, but his followers rationalize this just as his way of going back to heaven after making his point by coming back from crucifixion. They hide away the body to protect it from the Romans as they patiently await his second resurrection. (Or maybe the leader counted his blessings having survived execution and himself melted away into the backwaters of the empire without telling anyone.) As it was taking longer than they expected for Jesus to come back a second time, they later started a collection of sayings in the original Aramaic (the Q document hypothesis). At some point, a scribe marginally literate in Koine Greek tooks down Mark's version of events. Later on, other scribes working from these sources, passed oral history, and perhaps direct access to the disciples, wrote down a few more histories in Koine Greek. At some point, a physician (perhaps a freed slave, formerly belonging to a relative of Paul's) traveling with Paul tried to collect a proper history of events, citing names and locations of eyewitnesses. Paul makes note of the portions of his letters that he's writing out with his own hand rather than dictating to a Greek-literate scribe. So, it seems his audience expected even most of his writings to be through a scribe rather than directly written by him, despite him being literate in Greek. Presumably early Christians would have similarly been un-surprised that scribes were involved in writing Greek accounts for illiterate Aramaic-speaking fishermen. In any case, a mildly competent fraudster would have set himself or a collaborator up as the wise and brave hero, and would have vanished when it became clear that at best the leaders were going to spend decades on the run with only the clothes on their backs. Being mistaken about what they witnessed seems much more likely than an intentional fraud.

m463 3y ago

visually pretty similar. Thank goodness we live in the future with typesetting and even monospaced fonts so rn and m don't look similar.

ben_w 3y ago
Sometimes monospace can make it worse: early in my iOS work, I leaned on the alt key without (initially) realising, and got very confused by compiler errors caused by a "–" where it should have been a "-".
Tao3300 3y ago
A carnel through the eye of a needle. Might be a pastry. Might be part of a battlement.

Jedd 3y ago

I think there's enough evidence to suggest that whoever the people that wrote Matthew and Luke were, they were capable of introducing their own errors, along with embellishments, from their source material. Given they wrote in Koine, and exhibit some ignorance of the geography of the area, and almost definitely never met anyone that met Jesus, it's reasonable to assume no spoken Aramaic accounts were part of their source material.

timbit42 3y ago
Sure, but would they all make the same error? Either there was no error or they all inherited it from another source or Matthew and Luke inherited it from Mark. There is some evidence in Matthew that it could have originally been written in Aramaic.
- Jedd 3y ago
  I thought it was fairly non-contentious [0] that the authors of Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily (almost exclusively) from the author of Mark's work, along with this unknown source (usually referred to as Q). It seems fairly reasonable then to assume it was a literary device made by the author of Mark - his writing is actually pretty good as far as allegory goes - that was subsequently lifted near verbatim by the later two authors. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcan_priority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcan_priority
  - timbit42 3y ago
    The parts Matthew and Luke didn't get from Mark, but match, are considered to be from Q. There are some parts of Matthew and Luke that neither come from Mark nor Q so they each also have one or more other sources unique to themselves.
    - Jedd 3y ago
      > There are some parts of Matthew and Luke that neither come from Mark nor Q so they each also have one or more other sources unique to themselves. Given that we know nothing about the provenance or contents of 'Q' - it's lost to time, and its hypothetical existence is effectively intuited by some researches - I do not understand how we can identify the set of things 'not in Q' (or indeed 'in Q'). I'd also note that there's zero evidence to suggest the unknown authors of Matthew and Luke had other sources - there's more evidence to suggest they were simply making stuff up.

xp84 3y ago

UsefulCharts, is that you? (Kidding, but it also wouldn’t be that shocking)

timbit42 3y ago
No, but I'm subscribed.

trhway 3y ago

I just googled, and the things are even less clearer - looks like it isn't just a rope, it specifically means thick rope made out of camel hair.

tsimionescu 3y ago
Note that light googling is very likely to reach the same problem as the article shows about Cyril: varied sources that are actually all based on a single original unreliable source.

angiosperm 3y ago

To use the expression "the language Jesus spoke" is to imply that a Jesus actually existed and said things quoted. But the best current scholarship today demonstrates persuasively that no walking, talking Jesus ever existed (never mind was executed extra-judicially). If any did, nothing he said found its way into the New Testament. Certainly, neither Paul writing in the 50s, nor the Roman church elders who wrote 1 Clements in the 60s had heard of a Jesus ever saying anything noteworthy, despite that backup from that quarter would have enormously eased their own arguments. The anonymous author of "Mark" writing in the 70s evidently confabulated a Jesus to mouth Paul's opinions (as found in his letters) to silence quarrelsome opposition. Amazingly, "Mark" seems to have had little more than Paul to draw on, even then. Every scrap else written down seems to have been torched by his time. It is particularly interesting that (the anonymous forger of the book of) "John" chose to scrub the "camel" line from his personal canon. There is not so much as a hint of actual evidence that there was ever any such thing as a Q source, nor M, L, or J; nor any "oral traditions". All are figments of the bubbling "biblical scholar" imagination. The dozens of other gospels left out of the canon, and the even more numerous forged Pauline letters, a few adopted as canon, illustrate how wholesale fabrication was the normal mode of literary production in the early Church. What the anonymous authors of "Matthew" wrote not found in "Mark", of "Luke" that wasn't in either, and of "John" that wasn't in any, is very evidently their personal opinions on what their private Jesuses should have said. ("John" even invented from whole cloth an entire disciple, Lazarus, as his own Jesus's favorite that the other gospels have as at most a wholly hypothetical figure.) If you are curious about the scholarship, you could start at "Why Invent the Jesus" on YT. Literally none of it has even been replied to, never mind refuted, in any peer-reviewed medium.

singleshot_ 3y ago
Why would someone refute a kooky YouTube video in a peer reviewed medium? This does not seem like a good proof of the factual nature of the YouTube kook. There’s a guy at the end of my street who lives in a culvert and screams obscenities. I never saw him refuted in JAMA, though, so I guess by your logic he must be right? No opinion on whether you’re right about Jesus or the Bible; just saying you might want to think about your yardstick.