← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
Kiana
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- [00:33]
Megan Lewis
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
- [00:55]
Bart Ehrman
I'd like to welcome you to this special edition of the Misquoting Jesus podcast. This time I am not being interviewed by Megan, I am interviewing someone else. And I'm very pleased to be doing this. Today we're having an episode that features Kim Haynes Eitzen. She has written a very interesting book about sounds in the desert in light of what monks in the ancient world might have been listening to when they were off doing their monastic life. What were the sounds of the wilderness, the desert like? It's a really interesting book. I've never heard of anything quite like this and I'm really happy to have Kim on the program with us. Kim is the Hendricks Memorial professor of Early Christianity and Early Judaism at Cornell, where she has been, I think, basically forever, because Kim was actually one of my first PhD students and obviously did extremely well in her program and went on to teach at Cornell, where she's been for her entire career, where she's chaired the department and has been very active in life there, but has trained both undergraduate and graduate students there. She's authored a couple of books, Guardians of Letters with Oxford University Press and the Gendered Letter Alimpsest. Kim started out as having a real interest in manuscripts, in written texts. She had a rather unusual approach to these because she was very good in languages, even as a graduate student. I remember one time she came to me really excited because she had been looking at a manuscript and she'd found some marginal note in Arabic that she wanted to explain to me. Wow, really? And it kind of went from there. She lives in Ithaca, New York, because that's where Cornell is, but she also spends a lot of time at her remote, which is related to this particular book, in southeastern Arizona. So, Kim, welcome to Misquoting Jesus.
- [02:55]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Thank you. It's great to have this conversation.
- [02:58]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. All right. The book is called Sonorous, what Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and what It Can Teach Us. Those of you who are seeing this in video. This is a cover of the book. It came out from Princeton University Press in. Was it 2022? 2022. And the paperback is soon going to be available. And so I thought it'd be great to have Kim on to talk about this book because it really is quite different from anything I know of. Many people have studied monasticism in early Christianity, where it came from, what it was like. Those topics may be not widely known to many of you, but we'll talk about those. Some and many other people study are in the field called sou, which is a whole field to itself that most scholars of early Christianity know virtually nothing about. And Kim does both. And for this book, she incorporates these two together by talking about sounds of the desert, where it turns out that we might think that the desert is full of complete silence, but turns out it's not the case. Included in this book are recordings that Kim made in deserts in Israel, where she grew up, and in America in the southwest. And so desert sounds of various locations and deserts that one has access to by getting the book. So, Kim, that's my brief description of the book. How would you put it?
- [04:32]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Well, I think it's my attempt to see monasticism in a way that we haven't really seen before, and it's through listening. So when we think of early Christianity and we think of the development of monasticism, we almost always think, oh, celibacy. This must be about celibacy. But I became really interested in the. Yes, it's a kind of a trope, but there's also something to it, this kind of idea of leaving the city and going out into the desert and not just going part of the way out, but going as far out as you can go to have solitude and silence. And I was very curious about this quest for silence and solitude, because the texts that talk about stories of individuals like Antony or other individuals, Macarius, who talk about them going out into the desert, also talk about lots of sounds and lots of people. And I hadn't really noticed this before, I have to say, when I gave a very preliminary paper at an academic conference about what I was working on, and somebody very knowledgeable in the audience said, you're going to write about sound, I don't think you're going to find much. So I took that kind of that energized me because I had already been seeing that there were lots of sounds. And I was curious to know what other sounds I could find. And yes, they're in a way, they are silent sounds in the sense that they're recorded in a text that we now read, but we don't hear the sounds. But I really wanted to try to uncover something of what that desert environment was like and how particularly I was interested in environmental sounds, sounds of wind, rain, thunder, how those influenced these monks who went out into the desert looking for silence and solitude.
- [06:21]
Bart Ehrman
It's a very personal book, far more than most academic books are, because a good bit of the book, the beginning of each chapter, basically talks about your own experiences in these places with your early high level recording equipment, and often by yourself and trying to capture the sounds of the desert. You begin the book with a pretty interesting story about your early life when you were first introduced to sound. Do you want to say something about that? Because I think it's interesting enough to get people to want to maybe read more of this book.
- [06:52]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah. So I was born in east Jerusalem in 1967, after the June War of 1967. And so there were a couple of stories that very early on my parents would repeat to me over and over. And one was that my father would go out at the time, my parents were living in this village, Beit Jala, and it was up above the hills looking over Jerusalem, so they could see down into Jerusalem. And my father would go up onto a roof and could see shelling in Jerusalem. And my mother stayed in the house. She was quite terrified. But, you know, I heard that story so many times. And when I started working on this project, I thought, you know, I'm not thinking here scientifically or biologically, but something cellularly maybe got in there in terms of hearing sounds. And from the beginning, thinking about sounds as a way of the kinds of signals that sounds give you so caution, you hear a bomb, you know, to be worried. But then also, you were in the womb, right? I was in the womb, yes. So this is not. I'm not talking as a medical. This is not science here. This is not. This is in the imagination realm really. But I'm a little bit more unsure ground knowing that. My parents did take me to one of the monasteries that I studied for this book, that I visited for this book from an infant stage, which was the St. George of Chosuba monastery, which is actually a wonderfully open. You might think of monasteries as being kind of closed to visitors, but this is one. It's as you travel from Jerusalem down to the Dead Sea or down to Jericho, you would go past the canyon where this monastery is, St. George of Chosuba in Wadi Kelt. And they took us for trips there. And from an infant stage, my mother would tell me that she would take me. They would go there and my father would go up to the monastery and she would stay in the canyon basin with me, sleeping again, no memory, no real memory. But imagining that scene certainly was influencing my decision to go back to that particular monastery. And I really wanted to record the sounds, many of which would be the same today as they were then, many of which would be different. Jets, truck travel, but there are lots of sounds that would be the same wind in the palm trees.
- [09:22]
Bart Ehrman
And this is a spectacular looking monastery. I've driven by it a number of times, but never gone to it.
- [09:30]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Oh, it's great. And they are so hospitable. I mean, they're really welcoming of visitors.
- [09:35]
Bart Ehrman
Tell me what this thing looked like because, I mean, you'll have to describe it. I mean, it's like. Take a look at it.
- [09:39]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
So, yeah, this is one of these cliff wall monasteries. It's a monastery built into a cliff. You can see similar things in the American Southwest with cliff dwellings. So this is kind of. It's a version of that which is both for remoteness and safety, security. It's built in stages on the side of the canyon. So when you arrive, if you were gonna arrive today by bus, you would stop at the parking lot, you would start to make your way down into the canyon, and you'd get to the bottom, the creek would be flowing, that flows year round. And then you go up the other side and you can see the huge, really impressive and beautiful structure built into the wall.
- [10:22]
Bart Ehrman
When you drive by, it looks like it's falling off the mountain. I mean, it's just like. It's right there. It's like, wow.
- [10:28]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah. And the other thing that's really interesting about this, that shows us something about how monasticism kind of developed in early Christianity, is that if you walk down the wadi from that monastery, you will see lots of caves. And those were all hermitages. Those were dwellings for individual monks. And I think we can say pretty much invariably the way monasteries came to be constructed, and where they came to be constructed was around where these kinds of cave hermitages were. In other words, the cave hermit was first. And then over time, you have more and more people coming to reside in these caves. And then eventually a monastery is built.
- [11:15]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so that gets us into Monastic movement, generally. Could you say something about, like, when this whole. When people started becoming monks and, like, how it developed, like, what different kinds of monks there were. And just give us a little bit of background on all this.
- [11:29]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah. So the big forms of monasticism, we tend to divide them into two main forms. One is the hermit form. We think of hermits, solitary, individual anchorites. So that comes from this Greek word anachoresis, which means to retire, depart, go out. And then the other one is cenobitic monasteries or cenobitic monasticism, which is the derivation of that word, comes from koinonia, which means collective community in a group. And so you have cenobitic monasticism with monasteries sometimes surrounded by walls, sometimes built on a cliff face, and then you have these individual hermits. And most of the cases of early Christian monasticism, as far as we can tell from archeology, are really a combination of those two things.
- [12:25]
Bart Ehrman
You think these hermitages, at least at St. George's was the Hermitages were first. And do we think that that form among the anchorites preceded the cenobitics or.
- [12:38]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
I think so.
- [12:39]
Bart Ehrman
Okay.
- [12:39]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah. Not in every single location. But I think the earliest story we have, like Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, who's writing in the late fourth century, is writing about Antony in the third century. That's the story of a classic kind of hermit story. And then subsequently, a monastery is built around Antony's dwelling.
- [13:04]
Bart Ehrman
I see.
- [13:05]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Now, here we get into the really muddy area of tradition versus history, archaeology versus text. And it's very hard to sort out what comes first. But as far as we can tell, a lot of the residues of cave dwellings or hermitages seem to be earlier. And the larger monasteries are built around a small grotto, a small chapel, a small cave that has then been added onto to create space for multiple monks.
- [13:34]
Bart Ehrman
Yes. Okay.
- [13:36]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
And for visitors, that's the other piece to it, is that very quickly after you start having these stories of monks or of hermits going out into the desert, you have people flocking to see them.
- [13:47]
Bart Ehrman
Yes. Right.
- [13:48]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah.
- [13:49]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. So earliest stories, anyway, are about an anchorite. And those tend to be the earliest stories before you start having buildings. You have stories of people of hermits going out and being by themselves off in the wilderness. We're going to take a very brief break now for an announcement of a course, but then we'll be right back.
- [14:07]
Megan Lewis
Most people know many of the stories of Genesis, the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, the stories about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. But do you know what scholars say about those accounts, what archaeology, science and history can reveal about them, what their significance could be, even if they aren't literally true. Enter Bible scholar Bart Ehrman's captivating online course in the history, Legend and myth in Genesis. In six enlightening lessons, you'll journey through questions like, did Genesis borrow its stories from other cultures? Are these accounts historical or legendary? And who were the real authors behind the Pentateuch? Whether you approach Genesis as a believer, a skeptic, or simply a seeker of knowledge, this course will challenge your understanding of these ancient narratives. It's a unique opportunity to navigate the complexities of the Bible's most famous book. Don't miss out on this intellectual adventure. Visit barterman.com Genesis to learn more or sign up today and be sure to use discount code mjpodcast for a special discount.
- [15:18]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so Kim, I'm interested in these anchorites and going off into the wilderness area. And in some ways that sounds similar to what we get in other traditions, even in Judaism and Christianity prior to the third century. I mean, among other things, you have Jesus going off into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. And I assume that these early anchorites, Anthony and others, would knew these stories quite well. Could you just say something about why they were doing this? I mean, did they hate people? Did they not like the busyness of city life? You know, did they just want some peace and quiet? What were they doing?
- [15:57]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
It's a good question. I do think very explicitly, at least in the way the stories are told. They are modeling themselves after stories of Jesus going out into the wilderness. So that's certainly one piece to it. There's also a kind of philosophical tradition that's behind it, which is the sense of what do you need? What kind of environment do you need in order to be able to concentrate, in order to be able to not be distracted? So in different philosophical strands, of course, the ideal ancient philosopher is able to concentrate on the life of the mind no matter how many distractions are are going on. And yet there is clearly an awareness in these earliest texts that staying in a city makes it very hard to be contemplative, to pray, to be freed of the burdens of city life again. We don't know how much of what Athanasius says about Antony Athanasius coming from his own imagination, but he says, well, Antony was walking by church and he heard the passage read, go and give everything to the poor and come follow me. That kind of a passage. He took that literally. Give everything. He took care of the needs of his sister. His parents had already passed away and he was modeling himself, following Christ, following Jesus, was going out into the desert.
- [17:25]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, and was this tied up with a kind of an ascetic drive as well, or early off, right off. In Christianity we have asceticism where people in some ways really want to train their body or discipline their body or deprive themselves of pleasure or whatever for spiritual reasons. Is that part of what's going on too?
- [17:46]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah, I definitely think that the roots of monasticism are in the ascetic tendencies. So, I mean, asceticism just means a practice or a training or a way of life. But we see that tendency all the way back certainly into the first century. As you know, Paul says it would be better if everybody were like I am, hinting or insinuating or suggesting that it would be better for everybody to be unmarried. That's at least one way in which that was interpreted. So practices like fasting come out of that ascetic tendency, but Christians really built on fasting that came out of Judaism and really built into it an enormous framework, infrastructure, scriptural interpretation, way of life that made asceticism flourish, made monasticism flourish.
- [18:42]
Bart Ehrman
What do you think is driving this asceticism that ends up leading to monasticism? I mean, no sex, no wine, not much food, not much sleep. It doesn't sound all that attractive to many people, but some people, I think
- [18:56]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
it's the ideal of self control, which might sound crazy in our world, but my sense is that there was a kind of understanding that controlling the emotions, controlling the body, being disciplined was held up as a kind of ideal for what you need to live a well lived life, a happy life, that if you can be self disciplined and self controlled at every level, your mind, what you put in your body, what you do with your body.
- [19:29]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you get some things in earlier Greek philosophy about how pleasure is actually the enemy in a sense, because it ties you so closely to your body, it doesn't allow you to engage in. For philosophers there's mental work, but I guess for religious folk it'd be for contemplating God because you're just so focused on yourself and your pleasure.
- [19:51]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Right? Yeah. Yep.
- [19:52]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay, that's interesting stuff.
- [19:55]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
What's kind of interesting about that is that, you know, Christians take this and run with it to such extent that it doesn't seem anymore like that idea of self deprivation is a kind of suffering. It gets sort of turned around. You know, in the last chapter of the book, when I'm talking about how monks sort of Felt like they were coming home to their place in the desert. It's a language of desire. It's a language of love. Antony sees this place and he loves it. And it doesn't seem like self deprivation at that point.
- [20:30]
Bart Ehrman
Well, in your book, you point out that you yourself have this isolated place. I've never thought of you as particularly ascetic, but maybe you are. But you're often in Arizona someplace in the middle of nowhere. And for you, it is a pleasure, right?
- [20:43]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
It is. I can't explain it, and I no longer defend it. You know, I just. The experience of being completely alone in a place. And my favorite terrain is deserts. So in a way, one of the personal pieces to the book is that I combine three loves, which is the desert, the world of sound. I think I've always been. My way of, like, being in the world is through listening, really more so than other senses and my, you know, love of studying religion in the past. So, yes, it's a project that enabled me to get to my beloved desert.
- [21:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Well, let's talk about all of that. I mean, I think most of us imagine that, you know, you go into the desert on, you know, Sinai, or you go to the. Where? The Sahara or someplace, and, like, it's just, like, dead silent the whole time. And part of your book is you actually have interesting views of silence. And it sounds like your views of silence developed over time as you engaged in the research on this book. I mean, most people think of silence as an absence. Yeah, yeah. So talk about sounds of the desert and what silence is.
- [21:57]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
So alongside of this project, along the way, I became very frustrated with just reading about sounds. And I really wanted to experience desert sounds. I also wanted to experience that complete solitude, and I wanted to feel some sense of fear, because we definitely get the strand of fear in some of these monastic texts about what it's like to be out there alone. And you're there in your cell or your cave or your room at night, and you hear all sorts of sounds. Crashing sounds, loud banging sounds, what's going on? It inspires a kind of fear. Partly. I just went into field recording and I decided I'm going to record the sounds of a desert and see what I hear and also see what I hear. Hear what I hear, listen to what I hear and experience that kind of sense of fear to the point of it being uncomfortable. And early on in the project, I was really determined that I was going to record sounds of the desert without any interference of humans. That was a big thing for me. I really, I did not want to hear a human being. I did not want to hear airplanes, trucks, trains, any of that. I just wanted to have this idea, an experience of pure natural sound. And I was confronted every single time it didn't, no matter how remote it was, with a frustration because that is not available. But the learning piece to that for me was that I would go from one of those frustrating field recording trips back to the texts and I would see that's exactly what the monks were struggling with. You know, so that in some of the texts it says they heard the sounds of war. In one of the texts right there in Wadi Kelt about St George of Chosuba, it says they heard the sounds of the Persians, they heard the sound of the coming war. And I started thinking, well, wait a minute, that's an ancient. Like this sounds backwards. It's like a residue of what I was experiencing. And they were confronted time and time again by people, by voices. So I had to really rethink this idea that A, silence is an absence, and B, the desert is silent and C, that we should get humans out of the sounds. Because it's very much part of that monastic tradition, even to the point where in later monastic texts when it talks about monks contemplative practices. So one of the things is saying the Jesus prayer over and over, but it's not something that they're saying in their mind. They're saying it out loud. And so it's supposed to be under your breath. And that creates sound, right?
- [24:44]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I suppose in antiquity they didn't have to mess with the planes and trucks and things.
- [24:48]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
That's right.
- [24:49]
Bart Ehrman
But they're still, even without that, you know, there's a lot of sound out there and your, your recordings show it. I mean, it's just like, it's really quite surprising really, how, how much sound there is. But with these monks, some of the things you talk about is how some of these monks would hear, you know, screaming demons. Yeah, I mean, hearing is a. I mean, it's a physical process, right? I mean, sound waves are actually. It's a physical entity. So hearing voices, is it always a physical entity or does it matter if it's a physical entity? Like is it in your head? You see what I'm saying? Are there actual sound waves?
- [25:27]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
You mean, are there sound waves when you hear something in your head?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, I don't think there are, but I mean, what I meant is what are you. I don't think they're.
- [25:35]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
What are you hearing?
- [25:36]
Bart Ehrman
I'm asking what you're saying when you say they're always human voices, I mean, they don't always have to be human.
- [25:40]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
I see what you're saying. Yes. What I'm saying is that in just about every story, well, a big piece to the monastic literature is that these are the sayings of the desert fathers. Somebody asks the monk for a word and they respond, right there you have human voices. And so it's both imagined, but I think it's also experienced. So it's true you can go to a desert environment and not hear other humans. But if it were, I mean, I did experience this in one particular place. If it were so quiet that, like, my recording equipment couldn't pick up anything, first of all, it would pick up a hiss of the machine itself. And the other thing it would pick up, it would be my own heartbeat, you know, so that's the sound of a human. So you have your own body sounds. And there are ways in which you can record. Like people who record the sounds of birds, for instance. For scientific purposes, ornithologists use a kind of backing around the microphone so that the human sounds don't interfere with the sound of the bird. But the kind of microphones I was using were surround sound, and I was using two of them. So they captured everything. Anything I did was captured. Sometimes I couldn't hear anything with my own ears. But as soon as I put on these headphones and attached it to the equipment and I started to record, I could hear sounds I hadn't heard before.
- [27:11]
Bart Ehrman
I have this meditation practice, and sometimes I do try to get in the most quiet place I can. And I don't think you can get by without hearing yourself. I mean, you're breathing, and if you listen closely, you can hear your heartbeat. So there's always something. Explain more about silence. You said something about it not just being absence. And so what is it?
- [27:32]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah, I started thinking more about silence as a kind of presence, as a kind of attention. One metaphorical way I thought about it, but also not just metaphor. I thought about it like a musical rest. So when you come in a piece of music, you come to a particular place and there's a rest, and you're not supposed to play, but you know, there's something else coming. So there's like an air of expectancy. You kind of need that space. It is a breath. You take a breath sometimes, but there's an expectancy that something else is going to happen. And I think that sometimes silence in some of these texts seems to be like that. There's an expectancy. There's the calm before the storm. There's the one half hour of silence in the heavens. So I think that is a piece to it. The other. We haven't talked about this yet, but a big piece to the picture for Christianity as monasticism develops is that that idea of silence comes to be understood as intense internal silence. So like in meditation practices, in some meditation practices, when you're trying to quiet that inner voice or all the swirl of thoughts that we have, it's called to make a kind of inner silence, an inner presence. And that's how the silent contemplative tradition develops in Christianity, because it becomes very attuned to inner silence and what you need to do to cultivate that inner silence.
- [29:04]
Bart Ehrman
So in your book, you do talk a lot about kind of the comparisons between what monks were after and what we're after, you know, seeking solitude and seeking quiet and silence. And did you go into this with that idea? I mean, I remember when you first started writing this thing, when we would talk about it, it really sounded to me like what you were after. We're trying to figure out what monks actually heard. I might be misremembering that, what they actually heard. And somehow that would give you some purchase on.
- [29:33]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
I probably did. Probably began with thinking that. But if I'm really honest, I think much of this project was driven by my own desire to get out of the crazy, loud world and into silent places and have a kind of experience of my own that I hope doesn't distort what the ancient monks were experiencing, but that there might be some kind of resonance there. Because when I read these texts and when I still read them, there is a kind of desire in the text. Even texts that are not about desire, but these are texts, I think that the desire actually is for a kind of experience, a kind of contemplative experience. So I don't want to distort the past by viewing it only from the present, but there was definitely a personal interest in trying to understand what that experience was like.
- [30:31]
Bart Ehrman
It's interesting because if silence is not just like a negative, not just an absence, but there's some kind of essence to it, I mean, then an experience of it is a bona fide experience where something is affecting you. It's not a nothing, it's a something. And it does sound like the kind of thing that people, many people, strive for increasingly today, is to have some kind of inner life that isn't driven by externals.
- [31:02]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah.
- [31:04]
Bart Ehrman
Has the whole process made you more meditative? Or.
- [31:07]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Well, the short answer is yes, it's definitely made me more attuned to the sounds around me. And that can be good and bad. I mean, it can be helpful and frustrating is what I mean. So, you know, when I take a morning walk each morning, I'm very aware of which birds are in what locations, setting up their acoustic territories, their nests. Say in the spring. I tend to be very. Always kind of listening. I can't imagine, for example, going for a walk with headphones on. I know my students do it all the time. They walk across campus. They don't hear a thing that's going on because they've got their earbuds in. I'm so attached to hearing and to listening to the sounds around me. So I think I became a better listener by working on this project. And that really is, I would say, if I have a goal in writing this, one of the goals, I think, is just for us to pause and listen to the world we live in. I mean, we know, we hear all the time about how the sounds are gonna be changing. Insect apocalypse in Europe. One of the recent studies were showing that the sounds of insects are gonna be disappearing. Sounds of birds are disappearing in all kinds of ways. The sonic spaces that we live in, the acoustic spaces, the soundscapes, if you wanna use that word, are changing all the time. And I guess the other piece to that is with attention. I think I cultivated a better sense of paying attention or giving attention. I don't really like the word paying attention, but giving attention,
- [32:44]
Bart Ehrman
yeah. So with these monks, was the goal of the isolation to. I suppose different ones had different goals and such. But was one of the goals to try and find as much absence of noise as possible? Or was a goal to, like, embrace silence as a thing in itself? Was it a goal to, like, appreciate the sounds as parts of God's creation? I mean, in different meditation practices, you know, sometimes. Sometimes some meditation practices involve actually listening very carefully and, you know, wanting to hear sounds and then kind of embracing them. And others are to kind of be as kind of as quiet and have as little sound as possible.
- [33:24]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah.
- [33:24]
Bart Ehrman
And so there might be different goals for that. I'm just wondering about the monks. Is there any talk about this in this. In the literature?
- [33:31]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Not as much as I had hoped in the sense. And what you get is not a super clear picture. So I do think, you know, even though I didn't spend a lot of time writing about this, because this is a story that's told so much, I do think a piece of this is about you go out into the desert to with withstand temptation. That's a very clear goal. If you're not going to be martyred for your faith, if you're not going to be killed for your faith, then you can put yourself through the paces. You can really show your zeal by going out away from people, living a harsh existence and withstanding temptation. The temptation can come in the form of demons, can come in the form of people. So I do think that that's one piece. When they talk about various sounds, sometimes there's one particular saying that I still don't fully understand, which is when you're out there and you hear the sound of the wind in the reeds, you will be troubled. But if you hear that bird, you're going to be even more troubled. It's even more distracting. So they do talk about environmental sounds. And I think what's going on there is that it's a question of do those sounds distract you from what you are intending to do. Whether that's prayer, fasting, meditation, those sounds interrupt that effort.
- [35:02]
Bart Ehrman
I mean, I guess we should say, in case people hadn't picked up on this, you're not really writing a religious book. In other words, you're not kind of embracing something or trying to advocate for a religious point of view. But it does sound like you really are. Do have something to say. This is somewhat unusual for people writing about ancient Christianity, but you do have something to say for people, like, just in terms of what it means to be human and that we miss out on so much, in part because we try to take in so much. I mean, we, you know, we surround ourselves with things and we surround ourselves with sound and noises and. And people and the monastic life, as you seem to. I mean, you know, you're not yourself, you know, living in a cave some place most of the time that I'm aware of. But there is something about that that can absolutely enrich life without having to have the kind of religious commitments that they had going into it, I think.
- [36:00]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
So I think even having a temporary experience that takes you out of the world that you're accustomed to, and maybe even the comfort zone, your comfort zone and really having, whether it's a day, it's an hour, it's five minutes, or it's three months, it throws one's life into relief. It helps you ask different questions, experience other things and come back to it. When I teach a course called Sound, Silence and the Sacred, and I have my students make recordings every week, and then they come in and they play their recordings. And these are like, these can be recordings of their coffee maker. They can make a recording of anything. But they're supposed to talk about how that sound affects them. But what we also do in that class is by the end of the semester, sort of see what kind of listeners are we. And the students come out really frustrated by how noisy the campus is. And I think that's kind of that kind of uncomfortable. That's a good experience to feel frustrated by what's going on because you really are here listening for other things.
- [37:08]
Bart Ehrman
Well, okay. Thanks. It's a nice way to end. It's. Yeah. Would the people listened more. So again, the book is called the Sonorous what Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and what It Can Teach Us by Kim Haynes Eitzen, coming out now in paperback. So, Kim, thanks so much for being with us.
- [37:30]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Thank you.
- [37:34]
Megan Lewis
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.