It is from Mark 10;25, in which we are told: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”
When a much younger man, I decided to go into business. After from resigning from my tenured job, I looked for opportunities, and found one. Then, I ran into the above passage. At the time a Protestant, I had adopted the position of taking the Bible literally, and ran right into a stone wall. “What’s the point of going into business to make money if I can’t go to Heaven.”
I was paralyzed.
There were, to be sure, many “easy interpretations”, such as “The ‘needle’s eye’ referred to a narrow gate in Jerusalem’s wall that was so narrow that camels had to be unloaded to get through.” Others explained that it was simply an allegory. Too stubborn to listen to that, I remained in limbo until an odd thing happened.
A thought came into my mind, and asked “How would you put a camel through the eye of a needle?” “I’d freeze-dry it, grind it up into dust-like particles, dilute them, and dribble it through the needle’s eye with a tiny hypodermic needle.”
When the thought came to me that such a process would not produce a camel that could walk, just as a three-block long needle with an eye the size of a barn door couldn’t be used to sew a button on a shirt, I was stumped.
The thought continued: “What you do,” it seemed to explain to me, “is take an egg from an ovulating camel. Put it on a microscope slide, floating in amniotic fluid, and fertilize it with a donation from a male camel. When the fertilized egg begins to divide, carefully take a sterilized needle, put the eye under the growing cells, and they’ll go through the eye of the needle like a ping-pong ball through a basketball hoop. Then, reinsert the fertilized egg into the mother camel. When that camel is born, it will be a camel that has gone through the eye of a needle.”
So, I went into business.
