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.": <a href="https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html" rel="nofollow">https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html</a><p>And of course if you are wealthy then putting a camel through the eye of a needle isn't hard: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461089">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461089</a>
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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.