Hello steemians, today I want to clarify a doubt for all of you.
For any religion, the belief in what is dictated by the "sacred scriptures" does not cease to be an act of faith. In the story of Adam and Eve, the oldest in the Bible, there was an error that goes beyond any conviction. There never was an apple as "forbidden fruit", it was a translation mistake.
To understand what happened, we have to go back many centuries in time, but first, let's review what two of the most read books in history say: the Bible and the Koran.
According to Jewish, Christian and Muslim beliefs, Adam and Eve were the first human beings to populate the Earth. What for science was an African woman (mitochondrial Eve) and her homologue, Adam chromosomal-Y, these books summed it up in a simple way for the great masses, one day they appeared and were the first, without further explanation.
The books tell that Adam was created first, and that God, seeing the poor man alone, decided to give him a partner from a rib (the type of engineering is not explained). History today would hardly have an editorial outlet, but they were other times. According to biblical scriptures, the Garden of Eden story begins in the book of Genesis, beginning with verse 21 of chapter 1:
And God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female
The God of the Bible liked to challenge his "children", so he decided to test the faithfulness and obedience of Adam and Eve. What did? He told them to eat all the fruits of the trees of Paradise except one, which would kill them if they ate of it.
At this point a secondary character appears, a talking serpent representing evil to tempt (and deceive) Eve, who ends up eating the forbidden fruit: an apple. Then Eve feeds Adam, and as a result of both decisions, the two end up being expelled from Paradise, which has been known as the original sin in Christian doctrine.
So far everything is more or less known, only it is not really like that. Genesis never names an apple, it simply refers to "the fruit". So, who invented everything?
As we said, in order to explain it we have to go back to the 4th century AD. C., when the Pope Damaso I ordered his main scholar of the writings, Jerónimo de Estridón, to translate the original Hebrew Bible into Latin. A revolutionary project that took Jerónimo 15 years, and that resulted in the famous canonical Vulgate. For this, he used the Latin spoken by the common man (for the common people), although there was a catch: Jerónimo did not dominate the Hebrew.
As a result, the man confused some words, being the most important of the errors the one that had to do between the noun mālus (apple tree) and the adjective malus (evil). To be exact, originally in Genesis it says: lignus scientiae boni et mali ("God indicates to Adam and Eve that they should not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil").
However, Jerónimo mistakenly used the term "evil" for "apple," so that the vulgar who began to read the new version of the Bible ignored the original Hebrew scriptures and kept the apple as a fruit. In addition, the Hebrew Bible uses a generic term, peri, for the fruit that hangs from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Not only that, to complicate things a little more, the word malus in Jeronimo's time (and for a long time after) could refer to any fruit that carried seeds. A pear, for example, was a kind of malus, or a peach. This explains why the fresco of the Sistine Chapel of Michelangelo has a snake wrapped around a fig tree.
Be that as it may, after the Vulgate, the apple began to dominate the works of art, and from the paintings it became part of the common imaginary of society, with the Renaissance probably being the moment that most influenced the definitive image of that "fruit". prohibited "like an apple.
As for the role of the Church during all this time, it was of absolute silence. Maybe it was thought that the story was very good under the myth of the apple, or maybe many did not even know it. Be that as it may, in the original scriptures there was never an apple to explain that "original sin".