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.

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.

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.

And, demonstrated that it too was fabricated.

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.

> 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.

Plenty of people have faced the risk of persecution, torture and death for fallacious and fraudulent beliefs sincerely held.

Nevertheless, it remains the case that Christianity began with a diverse multitude of often mutually contradicting schools of thought and far more than four Gospels, all written decades if not centuries after the death of Jesus, about whom we know nothing beyond a scholarly consensus that a person existed upon whom the religion is based, supernatural claims notwithstanding. We certainly have not a single word or teaching that can be directly attributed to Jesus, or the apostles. Whether one considers that "intentional fraud" or simply religion and folklore in its natural state is up for interpretation.

And the "scholarly consensus" is based on phantoms and will-o-the-wisps that evaporate upon examination. The scholarly consensus among scholars who have actually examined the evidence in detail and published under peer review is unanimous that he most likely did not exist; and that if such a one did, nothing written in gospels/acts describes anything any actual person did or said.

Wholesale fabrication was the normal mode of production for religious literature at the time. Why would exactly four gospels, out of the many dozens, be different, that way? And why exactly those four and not some other? Their contradictions demonstrate their authors were not interested in accurately recording anything.

We need look no farther than 2 Peter to find dire warnings to pay no attention to the other Christians saying Jesus had not walked the Earth; so we know that was a common enough belief to worry its late forger. Of course anything they wrote was burnt in short order, along with them.

Sure. My point is just that "whole cloth" fabrication "right from the beginning" is far too simple an explanation. Anyone fabricating from whole cloth would have made the facts much less inconvenient. Anyone knowing they were making things up would have given up rather than spend decades on the run as reports of the torture and execution of their co-conspirators trickled in.

Your arguments have all already been comprehensively addressed, in detail, in the peer-reviewed literature, which you may read at your leisure. Your suggestions are there demonstrated as untenable.

As someone interested in the topic but without any particular knowledge of it, any pointers to peer-reviewed literature from either POV would be appreciated.