Most Jews have been separated from most Christians for millennia over the question of whether Jesus was the Messiah. But is the real question — i.e., the one that must be answered to heal this split — whether or not Jesus was the Messiah. Or can answering a more fundamental question heal it?

I believe the split can ideed be healed by answering a more fundamental question, which particularly involves recognizing that the Judeo-Christian tradition revolves around so-called Allegory of the Fall (Gen 3:1-22), wherein God casts Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden for having eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. For if there never was a Fall, there never would have been a need to expect a Messiah — be he Jesus or the one the Jews have been awaiting for millennia — as the Messiah’s primary task in both Christianity and Judaism presumably is raising humanity to its pre-fallen state.

According to fundamentalist Christian and Jewish exegetical reasoning, some of which may be almost as old as the Allegory of The Fall itself, that allegory is actually an historical account of events that actually transpired in a Garden of Eden at the beginning of history. Accordingly, fundamentalist exegetes have argued that the forbidden fruit was an apple, a fig, a pomegranate, or the like.

However, since none of these fruits can cause death, why would God have prohibited Adam and Eve from ingesting any of them? And if God had banned the ingestion of any of the them because they could cause death far, far back in history , why do they not cause death now? Why didn't the unknown author of Genesis, traditionally referred to as J, explicitly name the lethal fruit? And why did the Hebrews not uphold the ban on it?

These and other contradictions in the the Allegory of the Fall have led other, more liberal, fundamentalist exegetes to argue that the forbidden fruit was not lethal at all. But if it was not lethal, why did God tell Adam and Eve that they would "surely die" if they ate or even touched it? Was God lying?

According to one explanation of this paradox, God commuted the couple’s sentence and chose instead to expel them from the Garden, while another explanation posits that Adam and Eve were immortals before they ate the forbidden fruit, but were afterwards mortals, who eventually did die. However, both these explanations fail to account for the fact that God explicitly told Adam and Eve that they would "surely die" and specifically "on the day that thou eatest thereof."

Even more liberal exegetes have argued that the Allegory of the Fall was, as the name they've given it suggests, not an actual event at all. It was a literary device in which the characters and events stand for abstract ideas, principles, or forces. The moral of this story, they often argue, is that man must obey God to remain in his favor.

However, these exegeses fail to adequately explain, among other things, why the Allegory of the Fall deprecates the fruit of a tree that was evidently named for the knowledge of good and evil — as if knowing how to differentiate the two was somehow evil, in contradiction to humanity’s deeply rooted belief that such knowledge is of the utmost good. Moreover, these exegeses fail to adequately explain why this Allegory revolves particularly around people who attempt to become divine by eating a fruit which grew on a tree that was associated with a serpent. ............................................................................................