There was a small gate in Jerusalem's wall called "the eye of the needle" that camels had to kneel to enter

The earliest known trace of the "Needle Gate" explanation is a marginal gloss attributed to Anselm of Canterbury, written around 1109, more than a thousand years after Jesus's saying about a camel and a needle's eye (Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25) was first spoken. The idea later appears folded into Thomas Aquinas's commentary compilations, which is likely how it spread. No archaeological excavation of ancient Jerusalem has turned up such a gate, no first-century writer mentions one, and no rabbinic source references it either: for an idea that would have been a well-known feature of the city's daily life if true, the total silence across every contemporary source is conspicuous.

The three Gospel accounts don't even agree on the Greek word for "needle," which cuts against a single specific landmark being the shared referent: Matthew and Mark use rhaphis (a sewing needle), while Luke's Gospel (written by the most literarily careful of the three, addressed to an educated Gentile audience) uses belonē, a surgeon's needle. What all three do agree on is the picture: threading a large animal through the smallest aperture in common use, a deliberately absurd, physically impossible image. The Talmud contains a strikingly similar rabbinic saying about an elephant passing through a needle's eye, used the same way, as hyperbole for something no one would seriously attempt, not a riddle with a real solution. The gate legend quietly converts Jesus's point (with man this is impossible, but not with God, Matthew 19:26) into a solvable human logistics problem, which is the opposite of what the saying is built to do.