Imo it’s much more likely to have never been an actual piece of fruit. The story is probably an allegoric warning for some taboo subject and now we can only speculate on what was originally meant.
My theory: Adam and Eve were convinced by Adam’s one eyed snake to fornicate, but then their dad found out and kicked them out.
My money’s on it being a pomegranate originally. Apples wouldn’t have existed in the fertile crescent over 2000 years ago. Pomegranates are also messy and look bloody when eating them, fitting the “carnal knowledge” side of the story. I’ve heard other people suggest they could have been dates, but pomegranates seem like a way better fit for the story.
Adam and Eve never once complained about how freaking annoying it is to eat a pomegranate because 90% of it is dried bark and every tiny seed has its own inedible seed so I doubt that’s what it was.
In Western Europe, the fruit was often depicted as an apple. This was possibly because of a misunderstanding of – or a pun on – two unrelated words mālum, a native Latin noun which means ‘evil’ (from the adjective malus), and mâlum, another Latin noun, borrowed from Greek μῆλον, which means ‘apple’. In the Vulgate, Genesis 2:17 describes the tree as “de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali”: “but of the tree [literally ‘wood’] of knowledge of good and evil” (mali here is the genitive of malum). There is nothing in the Bible indicating that the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge was an apple.[10]
I think there was a non-canonical gospel that said so. And yes, the early church seemed to be relatively liberal with women’s rights. A lot of that got clawed back with later additions and choices of what books to include in the biblical canon.
rutgers.edu
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