{"id":117,"date":"2008-10-16T10:54:21","date_gmt":"2008-10-16T10:54:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/were-adam-eve-vegans.html"},"modified":"2008-10-16T10:54:21","modified_gmt":"2008-10-16T10:54:21","slug":"were-adam-eve-vegans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/were-adam-eve-vegans.html","title":{"rendered":"Were Adam & Eve vegans?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Adam<\/span>Hey, the Bible tells me so…After all, it was fruit (though not necessarily an apple) that Eve picked, causing all that trouble. (Just kidding.) But CNS’ Cindy Wooden, covering the Synod on the Word currently going on in the Vatican (see ZENIT<\/a> and\/or John Allen<\/a> for comprehensive coverage, as well as CNS), takes the occasion to do a bit a closer-than-expected reading. Her exegesis? “Adam and Eve were vegans.”<\/a><\/p>\n

My most recent trip back to the Bible, to the beginning of the Bible, was prompted by reading the new document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, “The Bible and Morality.” Basically, it says that God told Adam and Eve to be strict vegetarians — vegans, in fact – and that it was only after the Great Flood that God told Noah, and all humanity, that people could eat meat and fish.
\nCheck for yourself. In Genesis 1:28-29, God tells Adam and Eve that he was giving them “every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit” to be their food — and that’s it. Then in Genesis 9:3-4, God tells Noah and his sons, “Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did the green plants. Only flesh with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat.” And, before setting the rainbow in the sky, God tells Noah that he is extending his promise to all living creatures.
\nThe scholars, appointed by the pope to the biblical commission, cite the expansion of God’s covenant as part of their argument that respect for life in biblical morality “may well go beyond the interests of humanity alone to the point of warranting a new reflection on the preservation of animal and plant species.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pope picks fruit.bmp<\/a><\/span>My question now is, should we go back to our antediluvian origins in our culinary habits? Or is that a bit too much ressourcement<\/em>? Indeed, is it usurping God’s commands and the march of history? Pope Benedict himself is an animal lover, though whether he eats only what he picks (as in this Reuters foto) is doubtful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey, the Bible tells me so…After all, it was fruit (though not necessarily an apple) that Eve picked, causing all that trouble. (Just kidding.) But CNS’ Cindy Wooden, covering the Synod on the Word currently going on in the Vatican (see ZENIT and\/or John Allen for comprehensive coverage, as well as CNS), takes the occasion…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nWere Adam & Eve vegans? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/were-adam-eve-vegans.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Were Adam & Eve vegans? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hey, the Bible tells me so…After all, it was fruit (though not necessarily an apple) that Eve picked, causing all that trouble. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}