Over at NPR, Nina Martyris explains how the forbidden fruit of Genesis 3 came to be an apple. Short version: a Latin pun by St. Jerome and an epic poem by John Milton. Long version: In order to explain, we have to go all the way back to the fourth century A.D., when Pope Damasus ordered his leading scholar of scripture, Jerome, to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin. Jerome’s path-breaking, 15-year project, which resulted in the canonical Vulgate, used the Latin spoken by the common man. As it turned out, the Latin words for evil and apple are the … Continue reading Was the Forbidden Fruit an Apple?