Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

On this episode, we will be talking about the journey that two biblical objects took through

church history, the apple and the whale.

If you go back to Genesis 2, you're introduced to the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And in Genesis 3, we're introduced to the notion of the fruit of the tree, of the knowledge

of good and evil.

Well, what was that fruit?

Today, it's most commonly considered an apple.

That protrusion in the front of the neck is a piece of cartilage that protects the larynx.

We call it Adam's apple, don't we?

Doctors call it the laryngeal prominence, but alas, it's part of that apple stuck in our

throat from Adam.

We see apples all over in literature as the fruit, the identity of the fruit, the forbidden

fruit that Eve and Adam partook.

Well, if we go back to the original words, whether it's the Hebrew, the Greek, or the Latin,

what we find is that term is simply the generic term for fruit.

The ancient commentators would speak of it as an orchard fruit.

Contenders in the early church were the grape, the fig, and the pomegranate.

The fig, of course, because Adam and Eve make for themselves close of fig leaves.

So if there are fig leaves, perhaps it was a fig tree, and it's figs that are most commonly

depicted in early Christian art, in the frescoes in the Roman catacombs, depicting the fall

of Adam and Eve in the garden.

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