{"id":10971,"date":"2024-06-26T10:57:17","date_gmt":"2024-06-26T14:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/?p=10971"},"modified":"2024-06-26T10:57:17","modified_gmt":"2024-06-26T14:57:17","slug":"minister-long-claimed-that-the-biblical-garden-of-eden-was-in-florida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/06\/minister-long-claimed-that-the-biblical-garden-of-eden-was-in-florida.html","title":{"rendered":"Minister Long Claimed That the Biblical Garden of Eden Was in Florida"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Torreya State Park is nestled in Florida\u2019s northern panhandle, created in the 1930s as a nature preserve, but some say it houses a historical site of biblical proportions. One Baptist minister and former lawyer maintained for decades that this wilderness retreat was the literal site of the Garden of Eden from the Bible\u2019s Book of Genesis. Flanked by the Apalachicola River and home to the now endangered Torreya tree, the park got new neighbors in 1956, when the minister founded a \u2018Garden of Eden\u2019 tourist attraction in the nearby town of Bristol, with rates of just $1.10 per ticket.<\/p>\n

While many Biblical scholars and theologians\u00a0have spent centuries speculating\u00a0that a true \u2018Garden of Eden\u2019 once existed in Turkey,\u00a0Armenia, or at the head of the Persian Gulf (where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet), few have suggested Florida. But Baptist Reverend Elvy E. Callaway, then a retired lawyer, claimed that he had uncovered several geographical features of the local landscape that matched the description of the Garden of Eden as detailed in the Old Testament.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Garden of Eden, east and west, is not over 10 miles wide, paralleling the (Apalachicola) River from Chattahoochee down to Bristol,\u2019 as Rev Callaway\u00a0told a reporter for WFSU-TV<\/a>\u00a0in 1972.\u00a0 At the core of his argument was a passage in the Book of Genesis that said, \u2019a river watering the garden flowed from Eden, and from there, it separated into four heads.\u2019 By Rev Callaway\u2019s analysis, this four-fold split only appears at two rivers on Earth, the Apalachicola or another tributary half a world away in Siberia.\u00a0But Siberia, the former lawyer and one-time devout non-believer believed, was much too cold to be the paradise described in Genesis as the birthplace of humanity, according to one Florida reporter,\u00a0Anthony Talcott<\/a>.<\/p>\n