It was probably butt. Buttfruit. Eating ass was the forbidden fruit.
So the fruit was a dingleberry?
It’s common knowledge Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. I’m not sure why because it doesn’t say that anywhere in the Bible.
Well, I do. It was the easiest way to suppress women’s power in the church and in general.
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.
The gospel of Mary Magdalene for instance.
🍆 🍑
Apple is probably the most common interpretation because a lot of languages use it as kind of a vague fruit term, and the Bible has been retranslated and reinterpreted roughly one million times. The French call potatoes apples
The french call potatoes earth apples. Pomme de terre.
It is also an older german term for them, though I believe austria still uses it: Erdapfel.
Same in Dutch: aardappel (aard=earth, appel=apple)
Not to be confused with the Pferdeapfel.
Including English: æppel meant any kind of fruit, which is why you have names like pineapple and elephant apple.
Well I’d guess fig since the covered their naughty bits with fig leaves after
They were Palestinian, right? It was probably a Clementine.
The good thing about fiction is if there is a gap, you can fill it with your own headcanon
I’ve heard that before apples, pomegranates were the assumed go-to.
its like a banana except you have suck out the fruit from one end
Only a few know the truth, it was a tomato. I know because the way that it is.
That’s why people throw tomatoes when they want someone to get off the stage.
nice try, Tim Cook.
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.
I read somewhere it should have been a fig.
I don’t know why but I want to say persimmon. They’re worth getting tossed out of paradise for atnleast
Imagine them getting an underripe one and just getting that nasty dry mouth feeling AND getting booted from paradise to top it off.
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.
I like the “magic mushroom” theory.
I won’t say I believe it. But I like it.
Except that basically all fruits were apples for a really long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple
Etymology
The word apple, whose Old English ancestor is æppel, is descended from the Proto-Germanic noun *aplaz, descended in turn from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ébōl.[3]
As late as the 17th century, the word also functioned as a generic term for all fruit, including nuts. This can be compared to the 14th-century Middle English expression appel of paradis, meaning a banana.[4]So yes… We have no idea what the fruit actually was. Because all fruit were basically called “apple”.
Good thing there never was any apple because it’s all fantasy improv. Just decide on a fruit and you are as right as everybody else.
Good thing there never was any apple because it’s all fantasy improv.
The validity of the story was never in question for me… I’m atheist. Doesn’t mean we can’t discuss the story for what it is. It’s clear the writers of the story called it an apple because that’s what all fruit would have been called. That’s it. Don’t need to shit on someone else’s belief in the process.
Just like the majority of colors were more or less unnamed in a LOT of cultures until relatively recently.
Edit: Typo
Of course, and I did not shit on any beliefs. I only commented on the phrasing that you chose, namely “what the fruit was”. Even if you were talking about a short story fan fiction this would be the same situation.
The story had dozens of authors and rewrites. There is no correct answer. Possibly some authors and editors would give you different answers. My take is that there is no correct answer to be found and we can’t rely on checking facts of the event.
You can still approach the story on its own terms. If we said Captain Sisko drank tea rather than Raktajino, it’d still be wrong, even though Sisko and Raktajino don’t actually exist.
There is a original writer on startrek. They could recon Sisco to a tea lover tomorrow. The Bible is more like meme history, there is no regulating mechanism other than popularity. If you made the apple a banana tomorrow and most people agreed, it would be a banana and you would be right.
That’s more of a cultural thing, and one that I have broader things to say in terms of how copyright law has altered our culture.
Fantasy stories come from pre-copyright sources. Greek gods, elves, mermaids, etc. were all folk tales that developed without anyone caring about ownership. If the term “canon” meant anything at all, it was because the community accepted a certain set of stories by consensus. Biblical canon was done that way. Even this tends to be a written culture thing; oral cultures have a much more fluid understanding, and care less about consistency.
When copyright comes along, you start having big corporations controlling canon. We tend to only accept Star Trek things from Paramount as canon, and even that has limits; Star Trek comics and novels aren’t usually canon, even though Paramount licenses them.
Lord of the Rings will be copyright-free in about 20 years. It itself borrowed a lot from those pre-copyright folk tales. I’d be interested to see if the community starts to come to a new consensus on stories from new authors becoming LotR canon.
if you believe they will let it go. Tons of stuff hasnt made its way to the public domain, its all corrupt.
Not sure what you mean. If you mean they’re going to change the law again to extend copyright, note that Disney didn’t even try for Steamboat Willy. I made that argument 5 years prior to it going public domain that Disney wouldn’t bother, and it was already too late to push it through. People still told me there would be some big secret push to get it through Congress. They kept making that argument until literally the week before, when Congress was already out of session for the holidays. It didn’t happen, and Steamboat Willy hit public domain.
They don’t seem to have the stomach to continue indefinite extensions. Current copyright terms are probably as far as they go.
I’m not arguing for or against, just saying that there is no path on deciding what the author meant because we don’t even know who wrote it and they are long dead anyway. And there is nothing to study in nature because it was all fiction.
What the author “meant” is vastly overrated. The author is dead is sometimes more literal than other times.
We can pull information out of the text on its own. We can get cultural context to see how they would approach it. In OP’s case of the apple, we know that the term “apple” was a generic term for fruit for much of English history (and still is in some other European languages). We also know that what we call apple trees now don’t grow in that region, and therefore, it’s almost certainly not that kind of apple.
I think apple used to be a generic term for fruits.
It is especially apparent for exotic fruits, for example here is a list of fruits from the Caribbean, none of then are related to the European apple:
- golden apple
- wax apple/rose apple
- pineapple
- sugar apple
- custard apple
It can, but I’m not sure if that explains why it’s often represented as an apple in the west.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
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]
My German professor even mentioned the archaic apfelsine for the citrus orange.
Apfelsine is not archaic. Very widely used today, at least here in the south.
Also, it literally means “Chinese apple” lol
Potato (Pomme de Terre, Erdapfel)
In a slavic language (either Croatian or Czech, I forgot), it’s krompir, literally ground/soil pear.
