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“Nude Florida man and wife are evicted from landlord's property after "serpent" told them to steal fruit” might seem like a made-up headline - but it’s what happened according to one preacher.
Elvy Callaway has long proclaimed the biblicial Garden of Eden is not in the Middle East as previously believed, but in the humid swamps of central Florida. His claims were first made decades ago but are now brought back to the spotlight thanks to a report from News6 Orlando.
Torreya State Park, approximately 47 miles east of Tallahassee, Florida, is home to some of the oldest trees on Earth, dating back 160 million years. The Florida Torreya trees — called "stinking cedars" for the odor that occurs when they're cut or bruised — are rare now. Only 200 survive today, many of which are protected at the state park.
It’s their age that led Callaway to declare the area the home to Adam and Eve.
Callaway was a retired lawyer and a minister in the mid-1900s. After studying the region, he determined that the area matched the Biblical description of the Garden of Eden's location.
“The Garden of Eden, east and west, is not over 10 miles wide, paralleling the (Apalachicola) River from Chattahoochee down to Bristol," he told a media outlet in 1972.
According to the Book of Genesis, the Garden of Eden was located where a single river split into four heads. Callaway concluded that there are only two places on Earth that match that description — the Apalachicola River in Florida, or another river in Siberia.
He ruled out Siberia, deeming it too cold to have played host to the lush paradise, and concluded the Garden must then have been located in Florida.
The Torreya trees, according to Florida legend, may have played a role in another significant Biblical event. Locals reportedly call the trees "gopher wood," which bears a striking similarity to the type of wood the Bible says was used to construct Noah's Ark - gofer wood.
Callaway reportedly viewed that as further evidence that the true Garden of Eden was located just west of Tallahassee.
Some may object, pointing out that there are no apple trees in Florida. Callaway pointed out that the specific fruit that Eve ate that resulted in man's expulsion from the Garden is never stated. The image of an apple as the fruit that caused humanity's first sin was a later invention.
Most searchers for Biblical locations focus their searches in areas where the historical events of the Bible played out; namely, the Levant.
The Bible lists four rivers associated with the Garden: Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel — believe to be the Tigris River, and Phirat, believed to be the Euphrates River.
Some searchers believe the Garden, if it existed at all, to have been in Iran, or at the head of the Persian Gulf.
Likewise, Armenian communities dating back to at least the early 1700's have believed that Mt Ararat, the highest peak in Turkey, is the final resting place of Noah's Ark. That belief has spawned numerous attempts to locate archaeological evidence of the ship in modern times.
For Callaway, all that international travel was wasted effort; his Garden was just a quick trip from his home in Bristol, Florida.
He eventually opened up a Garden of Eden-themed attraction near Bristol to spread his theory.
Though Callaway is no longer around, his strong-held belief that the Garden of Eden was located in Florida's swamps has been memorialized through the Garden of Eden hiking trial, located at the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserves, just a mile north of Bristol.
