Text | Jiang Yinlong
Chinese popular for exchanging apples to express their blessings at Christmas. This is not a time-honored custom, because Christmas is not a traditional Chinese holiday; yet it is truly surprising: Jesus is the Christian Messiah, and the apple is regarded as the forbidden fruit of Christian culture. Behind this, there is a series of cultural accidents and historical coincidences.
This Christmas, did you send peace fruit?
The connection between the apple and the forbidden fruit stems from the Christian legend of original sin: the first step of human depravity was to steal the forbidden fruit under the temptation of the serpent, and in various literature, paintings, film and television works, the forbidden fruit appeared almost as many as the image of the apple, from this point of view, the apple is not "the doctor away from me", but "sin is close to me". But if you open any version of the Bible, you will find that there is no reference in this Christian scripture to the apple with the forbidden fruit. The first mention of the forbidden fruit is in the Chapter of The Old Testament Genesis:
It took a long time to find this harmless "Adam and Eve"...
2:9 God made all kinds of trees grow out of the earth, pleasing to the eye, and the fruit on them to be used as food. In the garden there is also the tree of life, and the tree of good and evil.
2:17 It is only the fruit of the tree of good and evil that you shall not eat, for the day you eat it will surely die.
3:6 Then the woman, seeing that the fruit of the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and adorable, and wise, took it and ate it. And he ate it for his husband and his husband. (The above is the "Harmony Book")
The Bible doesn't actually say what the forbidden fruit is
The tree here is the "tree of knowing good and evil", and the fruit does not have the name of "forbidden fruit", but vaguely calls it the fruit on the "tree of knowing good and evil". Considering that the same chapter appears as a "fig tree," a plant that really exists in the world, it is clearly unlikely that the tree of good and evil is an apple tree. Considering the background and geography of the creation of the Bible, the prototype of the "tree of knowing good and evil" is more likely to be a species that is extremely common in the Middle East, such as grapes, pomegranates, olives...
Don't think about peaches?
However, in the European painting world from the 15th century onwards, almost all religious paintings with the theme of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man chose to represent the forbidden fruit in the image of the apple. Earlier and more famous is the 1470 Flemish painter Hugo van der Gus's Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve, the two first ancestors of mankind described as withered and even somewhat obscene, and the apple that Eve was holding in her right hand and the apple she was about to pick in her left hand were depicted as similar colors to human skin, making it easy to think of the carnal desire that was about to stretch out in the Garden of Eden.
Because the protagonists of various versions of the oil painting "Adam and Eve" are too "natural", so everyone looks for it on the Internet (cover your face)
The German printmaker Albrecht Dürer also created a painting of Adam and Eve, and compared with the work of Hugo van der Gus, Dürer's characters are softer and more plump, and their expressions are more sweet and quiet. In this painting, the bright red color of the apple in Adam and Eve's hands complements the fair skin of the two, and this beautiful painting style seems to alleviate the guilt of stealing the forbidden fruit a lot.
Do you know Dürer?
It is also worth mentioning that "Adam and Eve" by Titian Vecellio and Peter Paul Rubens respectively, except for Adam's age and expression, the composition of the two paintings is almost exactly the same, and the forbidden fruit is unsurprisingly expressed through the apple. Why did these painters invariably choose the apple as the forbidden fruit? A more convincing explanation is that Apple spells "malus" in Latin, which is only one letter away from sin (malum) and is pronounced very similarly.
Obviously, this is the most evil apple!
In the fourth century AD, St. Elinor, who claimed to be "the greatest scholar of the ancient church," retranslated the Hebrew version of the Bible into a popular Latin version of the Bible, which had a great influence on the Middle Ages, and the connection between the apple and the forbidden fruit became increasingly stable under the influence of Latin. In the mid-sixteenth century, when the Council of Trento made this version of the Latin Bible the official version of the Catholic Church, it was not surprising that European painters referred to the forbidden fruit in the form of an apple. In English, a man's throat knot is called "Adam's apple", which means that Adam was found by God while eating an apple, and in a hurry, he stuck the apple core in his throat, thus forming a throat knot.
Christmas to send forbidden fruit... Are you sure?
After seeing the cultural origin of apples, do you still want to send an apple to your beloved girl at Christmas?