The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

I'm kinda curious actually, did this connection ever impact the popularity of apples?

I highly doubt they were eating wheat from a tree

I might be looking at it from too much of a modern cultural lens, but I figured a major part of it is that apples are seen as the "generic" fruit.

When did apples become associated with fertility?

Weird detail about that: in a lot of Europe, "apple" or the equivalent words were used for literally any fruit or nut (but not berry) that was foreign. This is part of the reason why the French name for the potato is "pomme-de-terre" or "apple of the earth" and the tomato used to be called the "love-apple".

Apparently this makes it really hard to figure out what stuff in folklore is actually an apple and what isn't. This means there's a non-zero chance that the Apple of Discord or the Golden Apples from Greek mythology may not have been actual apples.

Edited by Zendervai on May 4th 2022 at 8:54:08 AM

I mean it would make sense for the fruit to have literally been unique to the tree and not actually resemble anything we have on Earth.

Yep, and the Dutch name for potato is also "aardappel" or earth apple.

To be fair, they do look alike enough when peeled.

Here's an NPR article from 2017 about the apple thing.

NPR (04/30/2017): 'Paradise Lost': How The Apple Became The Forbidden Fruit

tl:dr; blame Milton and his Paradise Lost for taking that silly Latin pun too literally.

We’ve gotten a lot of our ideas about Heaven, hell, and the inhabitants thereof from Dante and Milton, it would seem.

Yeah, a lot of our pop culture ideas about Christianity are based on glorified Christian fanfiction.

How did those two become the most popular sources of it?

Because the actual source doesn't make for quite as interesting a read.

That and the Bible isn't actually interested in describing Hell in great detail. Because Hell isn't the point.

And all the cool apocryphal stuff outside of the Bible is considered not cannon, even with all the cool angels they have outside it. Like the Book of Enoch.

Then again, it’s sort of light on its descriptions of Heaven as well. Which is why I, for one, like to imagine Heaven as a tropical rainforest.

Even Heaven isn't really the point. The point is God, and He is beyond simple descriptions. He just is. The whole Bible is about God and the relationship He has with the people.

Edited by M84 on May 4th 2022 at 11:35:17 PM

Also, the Hell in the Bible is not really the same Hell we imagine today, at least in the Old Testament. It's more like what we would call purgatory, if anything.

Also, Satan doesn't live in hell, let alone ruling over it. Earth is supposed to be the kingdom of Satan, if anything, and he regularly shows up in Heaven in the OT. Hell will be his prison, but only after the rapture.

At least, that's my understanding of it.

There's also like four different things that were translated with the same word. One of them was a ditch outside Jerusalem that was used for burning garbage. The ditch is actually still there, it's just not used for anything these days.

This also runs into the issue of Satan not actually being any sort of defined entity. The name just means "adversary" and the few times it shows up in the Tanakh, there's zero reason to think it's referring to the same person every time, it's more of a situational title. And, I want to note, there is never an explicit connection drawn between Lucifer and Satan. Lucifer just shows up in one heavily metaphorical passage that...doesn't seem to have much to do with anything, but people took it as being really important.

Jewish tradition mostly lacks a concept of heaven or hell. There is an afterlife, but it's more just sort of...a place the souls of the dead go to sleep after they die, it's not really a punishment or a reward. It's why Jewish tradition holds that what people do in this life matters so much.

Edited by Zendervai on May 4th 2022 at 12:21:44 PM

A lot of people have forgotten that the Devil isn't the "Ruler" of Hell, but its "utterly powerless VIP-Prisoner", stuck there in the dark and cold for all eternity... Alone.

Nothing more and nothing less.

Edited by TitanJump on May 4th 2022 at 6:16:55 PM

Well at least we got Al Pacino making a cool speech about it. ;)

Uh, one thing that I think gets overlooked a lot and that I think should be stated in this context is that a ton of people have this idea that Christianity is Judaism 2.0.

It's really, really, really not. At all. In any way. The two religions behave completely differently and handle the overlapping books entirely differently as well.

Jewish understanding of various Tanakh concepts tends to be very different from the Christian understanding, and a lot of the Christian understandings of things tend to be kind of...wrong. And it spreads into the New Testament too, where bits of Jewish culture at the time weren't explained in the Gospels and Christian scholars just...didn't bother asking any rabbis about it for centuries.

Like, I think the book of Esther is a great example of this. In Jewish tradition, it's considered a historical or semi-historical event that serves as the origin for the Purim festival. Christians gloss over the historical context and impact and turn it into a morality fable about standing up for yourself and your beliefs, ignoring how there's a different character who did that exact thing in the story who gets executed for it.

Esther was only included in the Old Testament because it was decided to keep the whole Tanakh because it never once mentions God and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything else. It doesn't fit into the Jesus narrative (it's entirely extraneous) and nothing else mentions it.

Edited by Zendervai on May 4th 2022 at 12:30:25 PM

There is, I think, a disconnect between ancient and modern belief systems that goes beyond simple details in this or that doctrine or holy book. People in ancient times simply had a weaker understanding of the importance of individuals in and of themselves, apart from the communities they belonged to. Our modern emphasis on the importance of personal faith and introspection is a relatively modern thing. Back then, sin wasn't an individual act, it was a collective one. That's why public rituals were so important, and why everyone assumed you could change the faith of an entire population simply by converting the king or the emperor. To that extent, faiths based in ancient traditions, like the Greco-Roman pantheon, or ancient Judaism, didn't emphasize the afterlife as a place of individual judgement so much. Heaven as a reward, or hell as a punishment are modern sensibilities that aren't clearly reflected in ancient doctrines (to the extent that they even had "doctrines", as opposed to rules and practices that everyone had to follow).

It's hard for us to wrap our heads around, but mattered then was the collective destiny of entire communities, which were seen as having a shared mystical connection, and not the fate of this or that individual.

Early Christianity may have had its origins in Jewish doctrines but a lot of it was the syncretic form known as Hellenistic Judaism. Christian belief in the afterlife is very heavily inspired by the Greek version, with Heaven being based on Elysium and Hell being based off of Tartarus.

I thought the concept of heaven and hell was influenced by Zoroastrianism.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170406-this-obscure-religion-shaped-the-west

Over on You Tube, Religion For Breakfast has a few videos which discusses the origins and development of hell and Satan in Christian theology as well as other early Christian beliefs and developments. The guy is a researcher in religious studies and is pretty good at presenting and citing his info. It's worth watching if you got some free time.

There was a ditch translated as hell? Oh, I gotta remember that one.

Which passage is it?