Is Persephone and the pomegranate related to the christian apple story?
To the best of my knowledge, the two are unrelated. In the story of Persephone, she is abducted by Hades and the eating of the pomegranate seeds meant that she had to spend as many months in the underworld as the number of seeds she had eaten. According to ancient mythology, this is what caused the winter months. In the Scriptures, however, Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit represented their direct disobedience of God’s commandment to not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In the Christian religion, this was the first sin. The ‘apple’ (although the Bible never specifically mentions what sort of fruit it was) had nothing to do with the causing of winter, and Persephone’s pomegranate had nothing to do with sin.
