Note 26 — Chapter I · FABULOUS SOURCES

Whatever the date to which the Book of the Penitence of Adam may be referable, it represents one form of a legend which was spread widely in the Middle Ages. The Gospel of Nicodemus seems to have instituted the first analogy between the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of the Cross. “All ye who have died through the wood which this man”—Adam—“hath touched: all of you I will make alive again by the wood of the cross.” The legend of the triple branch, under a strange transformation, reappears in that chronicle of the Holy Graal which has been ascribed to the authorship of Walter Map. There is no end to the stories which represent Christ dying upon a tree which was a cutting from the Tree of Knowledge. This is how the Tree of Knowledge becomes the Tree of Life in Christian legend.