It's in There... NOT!
The CBS "Bible Blog" introduces, "It's in There...Not!" a summer series of short blogs on common mistakes and misunderstandings about the Bible. This will include items and quotations that we may think of as biblical, but which in fact are found nowhere in the Bible. Here's the first in our series:
#1 - The Apple in the Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 3, but the kind of fruit is never mentioned. The introduction of an apple is an imaginative leap that has established the apple as a symbol of temptation in Christian tradition. We can probably thank artists and writers over the centuries for this innovation. (What would the "fruit" of knowledge look like, anyway?)
It has also been suggested that the tradition of the apple came from a phonetic association in Latin, where the word for evil ("malum") sounds a lot like the word for apple ("malus").
Feel free to email BJ Daly Horell with your favorite items and quotes that are not found in the Bible. I'll include as many as I can in this summer blog series!
(Materials for this series will come from a variety of sources, including the internet, biblical commentaries, and the authors' imaginations.)
