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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jonathan Lookedew
Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Books Network. I I'm Jonathan Lookedew, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Kim Haynes Eitzen about her new book, the Gospel of A Biography, published by Princeton University Press in 2026. Kim, welcome to the show.
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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Jonathan Lookedew
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your book the Gospel of John A biography. Before we get into the book itself, could you begin by telling us a bit about your background?
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Sure. So I talk a little bit in the preface about my background, and I do think it's kind of related to my Interest in writing this book. So I was born actually in 1967 in Jerusalem after the June War, and my parents had been living there for a few years. I don't know how much detail you want, but my father initially went to what was then Jordan as a volunteer during his college years. And he's an avid language lover, studier of history, and very interested in biblical studies. And so, yeah, they lived there for about 20 years. And I was. So I was born in Jerusalem and then raised in Nazareth. And at the time, my father was then working at a Scottish hospital in Nazareth. So the bulk of my growing up years were in Nazareth. And, you know, I think at the time when I was certainly as a child, my father lugged us to all of the. All the archaeological sites and we would read stories and then go visit the site that was supposed to be where this story took place. And a lot of times, I think as a child, I thought it was incredibly boring because you would go to one archaeological site and it was one pile of rocks, and you would go to another archeological site and it was another pile of rocks. So it was really when I came back to this country, to the US to go to college, that I found myself really, in a way, transported to my childhood when I was taking religion classes, especially religion classes that dealt in some way with the Bible. And for me, it was just a very. Yeah, a way of transporting myself to home. And I think the other piece to this book in particular that relates to my childhood is that I grew up seeing a lot of interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims and, you know, understanding that on a daily level, people as neighbors and, you know, going to the market together, but also seeing the points at which there were tensions that emerged. And I think I was probably, I was acutely aware, for sure of the tour groups that would come to Nazareth, for example, and other sites like Megiddo, they would come to these sites and they would talk about the biblical stories that had to do with that particular site. And I always found that kind of fascinating and wondered too, the way in which these biblical stories have an afterlife. So they may come to be written at a particular time, but then they have this very long and complex afterlife. And I find that fascinating. And so the way this book in the series that Princeton University Press has, lives of Great Religious books, this book kind of the format of it lent itself to kind of coming back to some of those childhood memories, but also thinking through what's the legacy of a particular book after it comes into the world, what's its Subsequent life.
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Jonathan Lookedew
That's really, I think, a rich thing to reflect on. And the series format does lend itself to thinking about the afterlives of these books. But as well, just your experience of growing up in Nazareth, it seems like it gives a first person perspective to some of your writing or an ability to call on things with a clarity that is different perhaps from someone such as myself who has not visited Nazareth before.
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah, I think for me, it does help me to kind of visualize places. I can sort of see places in my mind and I can, you know, smell the smells of various places and hear the sounds. And I think it does in a way it brings the texts alive in a different way than it might through, say, deep theological study, which also brings the text alive. But yeah, I've been very aware that in a way, even my decision to go to graduate school to get a PhD in New Testament and early Christianity and early Judaism came from my childhood and just an affection really for that part of the world and for the deeply complex history that's there.
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Jonathan Lookedew
It's really wonderful to hear how that experience has maybe shaped the way that you've approached this book and perhaps some of your other writing and your other work in your career. I suppose, thinking about this book on the Gospel of John, you devote a really fascinating chapter to the Gospel of John as a physical artifact, including its use in early Christian amulets. Could you talk about the role of amulets in early Christianity and how passages from John were incorporated into them?
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yes. So in that chapter I was really trying to think about what does it mean to consider the Gospel of John as a kind of artifact from its earliest writing as a book? What did those books look like? What was it inscribed on, what was it written on, what did those kind of codices? So that chapter is really looking at the writing of the Gospel of John on papyrus codices and then parchment. But I wanted to also expand beyond just thinking about the Gospel of John as a book, because one of the things we do have, I mean, we have thousands of papyrus fragments, and they aren't just, of course, biblical books. Homer, philosophers, you've got a lot of papyrus remains, and they're housed now in different museums or libraries, rare book collections. But I was very interested in amulets. And I can say a little bit about why I was interested. But maybe I should just start right with your question about the Gospel of John on an amulet. So normally what we see for copies of the Gospel of John in the earliest centuries are these sort of small, sometimes even squarish Codices with pages, you know, that you can turn in the format of the book that like we think of books instead of the scroll format, that was what was typically used for Greco Roman literature as well as the Jewish scriptures, the Hebrew Bible. So amulets took in a variety of forms. The one I talk about in this book is a very long, narrow piece of papyrus that is inscribed, related to a woman named Joannia, which hopefully that sounds a little like John, because in Greek they're the same name, just the feminine version and the masculine. And in the midst of that, there's a quotation that from John. So this is an amulet so long and narrow, which means that it was, you know, it was written on papyrus and it was probably rolled up. So it would be rolled up and sometimes these little things would be put in some sort of a. I wouldn't. A locket doesn't sound like quite the right word, but some sort of a casing that could then be held, hung around someone's neck or hung by a bedside. So this one, you know, is about. It says, rescue Joannia from every evil. And then it quotes from the very beginning. It says in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word. All things came into being by him and without him. Not anything came into being that has come into being. So it's a quotation right after this, like protection, statement of protection. Then quoting the Gospel of John. And then it's sort of a prayer that's in there too. And at the very end, it talks about John, the holy and glorious apostle and evangelist and theologian. So this is very much what I would consider a Johannine amulet. And somebody wanted to have this prepared as a way of having protection. Maybe Joannia herself asked for this to be written so she could wear it or hang it by her bedside. We have a lot of interesting amulets that are Christian amulets. And one might think that isn't that magic? Wouldn't that be considered wrong to do that? Isn't it somewhat akin to perhaps pagan practices? And my response to that would probably be yes and no. Using amulets. I mean, we're talking about a world in which there isn't the kind of medicine that we're used to. There isn't any of the kinds of supports and for navigating life and its uncertainties that we kind of. We often take for granted in our modern world. And people resorted to a variety of mechanisms to ensure that things would go okay. If you're going on a trip, you might have A scribe write some sort of a little prayer that either you could take with you or you would have, that would, you know, say, you know, I pray that this goes well this trip, that I'm safe in this trip or so and so in my family is taking a trip or my aunt is sick, can you heal her? And so there are a lot of these amulets that seem to be about healing, some of which there's a really interesting one, it's later, I think it might be 6th century or so. It almost looked like a cutout form. It was probably multiple layers of papyrus, one papyrus sheet and then was cut in such a way that when you open it up it has all these holes, almost like if you were going to, you know, make like as kids if you folded up a, something that you made into a snowflake that you then could hang on your window. It's almost like that. And it has a passage from the Gospel of Matthew in it saying Jesus, you know, went out healing in the, in the village or among the people. He healed them. Now we know that there were church fathers that were very opposed to this practice and they write against it and they say, you know, this is just, it's not going to do you any good. That's one problem. And it's akin to magic or you know, somehow it's just, it's not good Christian practice. It's something that should be avoided. And very often what we see is, and one of the things I find interesting about it is that they are somehow attached to women. And the ideas behind these church fathers comments in part has to do with not wanting women to engage in certain practices. So whether it's wearing an amulet or hanging it by your bedside, we have statements saying don't do that. And yet these amulets exist and they're very fascinating to read and to look at the variety of shapes that they were in and to think of them really alongside of the Gospel of John in its book format. Spring just hits different one day, cold mud the next, warm sunshine. But the hard working men and women in Carhartt don't wait for the forecast to get to work.
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Jonathan Lookedew
Hatching roads, clearing trails, planting crops.
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Their hands turn this season's uncertainty into possibility. So get out there, spring into action. We've got you covered for whatever the season throws your way. Carhartt made possible.
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Jonathan Lookedew
Yeah, that's really interesting to think about. Not just the big codices that are, are perhaps slightly better known but, but also the, the amulets and the, the popular practices that incorporated the gospel of John into their daily life or their kind of reflections and prayers. Well, you also touch on. On early debates about the divinity of Jesus in your book. And one of the texts that you describe is the Apocrypha of John. For listeners who may not be familiar with this text, what is the Apocryphon of John, and how does it draw on language from the Gospel of John when it portrays Jesus?
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Okay, that's. So the. The Apocryphon of John is. We have several copies of it, and it was found among These set of 13 codices, 13 books that were found in 1945 just near a village in Upper Egypt, Nag Hammadi. And once they came into the hands of scholars who started to decipher these, we learned that they're all written in Coptic, but many of them are translations of earlier Greek texts. And the Apocryphon of John is probably one of those. The earlier Greek translated into Coptic, the latest stage of the Egyptian language. And it's a fascinating text, not because it's completely clear about what it says. In other words, many of these books that were found in this collection are what we would think. Think of as very esoteric. You almost have to be an insider to really make sense of them. They've come to be attached to a movement which extended beyond early Christianity, a movement we might call Gnosticism. But there's a lot of debate about whether we should even use that phrase as though it's a coherent whole. But it seems to be. These are books written by people who argued you need a special kind of knowledge, including a secret knowledge, for salvation. And what does that look like? A lot of these books are dealing with what are the origins of evil? How did we come to be in the situation we're in, in this world? How is it that we have so much suffering, and how is it that our body gets ill? All of these kinds of questions seem to be behind, in a way, these texts that are wrestling with the problem of evil and how to escape this earthly realm that is filled with suffering. So what's interesting about the Apocryphon of John is that let me start by saying the Gospel of John, of course, begins in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and. And what that initial verse is doing is placing Jesus at the creation of the world. So when you come to the Apocryphon of John, one way of reading that is that it's now an expansion of that as well. What happened at the very creation of the world? And in fact, what happened even before the world was created. How did evil. I mean, it's a text that's interested in how bad things, why and how bad things happen. So how did it come to be? If we imagine that there is an all divine God who creates the world, how is it that there is so much suffering and how is it that there's so much evil? Of course, the Bible has one story about Adam and Eve as well as other ways of exploring, explaining those kinds of questions. But the apocryphon of John, I mean, I can just. It begins with a kind of telling. The way it begins gives us a pretty good insight into what its claims are, because it says the teaching of the Savior and the revelation of the mysteries and the things hidden in silence, and even these things which he taught to John, his disciple. So it's all about, you know, this is mystery. This is about coming to understand something. And then it begins by talking about John, the brother of James, the sons of Zebedee come up to the temple. So some of it is just sort of narrative that seems, might even seem familiar from New Testament gospels. But as the text develops, it becomes quite different and it's really trying to explain how should we understand this all divine, all good God and this idea of God, the father of everything, the invisible one who is above everything. He's incorruption, which is in pure light into which no eye can look. He's the invisible spirit. There is just passage after passage here that's trying to explain this idea of the all divine. And what happens in this text is the idea that if you have the theology that God is this all divine, all powerful, immeasurable, that's some of the words that they're using, entity or figure, then you have a problem because that is very, very separate from human life down here. So you have to somehow wrestle with how is it that the divine realm relates to this earthly realm. They seem so different. The divine realm is all good. The earthly realm is filled with suffering and people have bodies that get sick and they die. And it's a difficult world to live in. And this text is trying to explain that. It's basically trying to explain how it is that some part of that all divine spirit world came to be trapped down here in this earthly realm. And it's the job of the Gnostic in a way to understand that and reunite that with its heavenly realm. So it becomes, as the text goes along, it becomes more and more esoteric. And it takes a lot of study in a way to really try to make sense of what they're talking about. Terminology is odd, but the basic idea is how do we explain the existence of evil? And it's using the Gospel of John both because it's using that figure of John the Evangelist, but it's also, it loves the language of John. The Gospel of John uses all kinds of dualistic language like light and darkness, spirit matter, or really it's heaven and world. You know, you've got a lot of dualisms in the Gospel of John. And then it's also the Gospel that uses this word know K, n o w to know something. You know, it's very interested in this idea of knowledge. And that is one of the ways in which it becomes so fruitful for Gnostics for whom the Gospel of John was, you know, the most important gospel.
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Jonathan Lookedew
It's really interesting to see how this early Christian author or community or however we want to talk about the person or people who were involved with writing this, but how they were wrestling with both Johannine language and the problem of evil and how to explain God within all of that. And it does feel a little bit different from maybe the 4th century discussions. They go on later to wrestle with Jesus divinity. So I found that really intriguing in your book. Well, your book covers the entire life story of the Gospel of John, at least in terms of the time from when it was written to the present. And along the way you also discuss JOHANN Sebastian Bach's St. John's Passion. How does Bach engage the Gospel of John in, in that work? And why has this piece become controversial in some circles?
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah, so I will say that I have. One of my, one of the aspects of my background is that my undergraduate education was partly in music. And so I, I've, I've always loved the music of Bach and I, you know, was very drawn to understanding how Bach used the last chapters of the Gospel of John, starting in chapter 18, as the basic text for his passion of St. John. And what's striking about it is. So one of the themes I'm tracing in the book is the Gospel of John. If we're comparing it to all, you know, thinking about it as one of four gospels that are canonical, it is in many ways the most anti Jewish instance. It uses the phrase literally. I mean, the exact phrase is the Jews almost 70 times. And it doesn't appear in the other gospels. And what you see in this gospel is that it is increasingly negative. Yes, there are characters like Nicodemus, who's identified as Jewish and he's a good character in the early chapters of John. But there's a growing hostility. Jesus does some sort of a miracle. And the Jews, using that phrase, are, you know, concerned about what he's doing. They want him to be brought up on charges. There's a very striking the story of Jesus in the temple. It's often called the cleansing of the temple. In the Gospel of John, it happens at the very beginning of the gospel, the second chapter. And it's not something that leads to his arrest. It's organized in a very different way. But he's also in a very striking image. He's wielding a whip in that particular story in John. And there are a lot of visual renderings or representations of that in art that are very striking. So one of the things that Bach does is he takes this text of the Gospel of John was also kind of radical. He was doing this in German rather than in Latin. And he. When you set a piece of music, set a text to music, the music allows a way to heighten the words. So in other words, something that might seem on the page to be fairly straightforward. Well, when you add music to it, you can bring it to life and you can even exaggerate some aspects to it. So starting in 18, when Jesus is arrested and he's brought onto trial and then he's executed, one of the things Bach does is he heightens some of that anti Jewish language by using a kind of. I mean, the way the text works is that you have different characters. You'll have the evangelist who's the narrator of the Gospel of John, you'll have Jesus, you have Pilate, and you have the crowds here called specifically the Jews who are calling for him to be crucified. And when those figures come up and Bach sets that to music, it becomes ever more insistent. And the music itself is really. It's very rhythmic, it's very insistent. It's very forward motion. It sounds almost militant. And so I was interested in that as a way of approaching the Gospel of John and its legacy through music and also to the way a piece of music like that can heighten some of the charged language in the gospel itself.
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Jonathan Lookedew
It's really interesting. It seems like that forces us to wrestle both with the language of the Gospel of John, but also with ourselves or with other interpreters of the Gospel of John and what we see in the text.
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yes, yes. I mean, I should say that there have been, you know, some newer, it's not all new scholarship, but there's been some scholars who have argued that we should render the phrase The Jews, that's what it is in Greek as the Judeans, which really alters. I think, one of the difficult things about this gospel, on the one hand, it has beautiful language, it was beloved throughout Christian history, and on the other hand, it has a real challenge in the way that it presents Jesus and his opponents. And I think it has a challenge. It had a challenge in its origin, but I think it also has a challenge for readers today to wrestle with that. And one of the reasons why there's always or there has very frequently been controversy about the performance of Bach's Passion is because you have a choral group, you're gonna have a choir, you're gonna have orchestra, you have an audience who are singing these words that I think to our ears should sound kind of troubling. What does it mean to be chanting, the Jews are saying, crucify him. Crucify. And so oftentimes what happens is that before a performance, the conductor or some, you know, usually the conductor as well as maybe another musician might give a little talk, a little pre concert conversation about why we still perform this piece. I mean, it's an exquisitely beautiful piece of music and at the same time has some troubling things for us as listeners and as readers. So sometimes there are some performances where they've actually changed some of the words so that it doesn't sound so strident, it doesn't sound so anti Jewish. But yeah, it remains kind of controversial about whether it should be performed or not.
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Jonathan Lookedew
Yes, yeah, I can see that. And I think your chapter you're writing on this piece brought out both how Bach was using John and also the controversy quite well. We've alluded to interpreters today and to ourselves or people today who are listening and perhaps reading the Gospel of John. Maybe coming closer to our time, you include a chapter on American evangelical reception of John. And I was especially struck by your discussion of Leonard Knight's Salvation Mountain. Could you describe Salvation Mountain and how Knight wove the Gospel of John into his project?
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yes, I think the first thing, though, I should say is that, you know, writing a book like this, I don't think it would be possible to write a book like this that was comprehensive. And this certainly does not attempt to be comprehensive. I mean, my expertise is in early Christianity and then I bring it forward to the present day. But really, you know, the chapter on evangelicalism, it could be much, much longer. That obviously that would be a book in itself. Leonard Knight is an interesting case of one way of seeing visually how he was a Pentecostal and in 1971, he built this. I mean, he constructed this. He called Salvation Mark, Salvation Mountain. It's a mound, really. It's a mound of dirt and, you know, plaster. And he painted it in really vivid colors. And he put on it so lots of different shapes on it. There are hearts that. The centerpiece is God is love. And that actually comes from the Johannine epistles, so, which are obviously connected to the Gospel of John. And then he has some passages from Acts. He wrote out painted passages, and he included John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that passage. And I think what I was trying to do there was just to show, in a kind of vivid way, another instance of the usefulness of the Gospel of John and the engagement with the Gospel of John here for something that's incredibly visual. But people make trips to go see the mountain or to see the. I really think of it more as kind of a mound, not really a mountain, but it becomes kind of like a pilgrimage site. And so it quotes from John, it quotes from Acts, and the painting itself is really vivid colors. It doesn't come about in the book because the book just has black and white imagery, but red, green, blue, white. It's very dramatic and has a cross on top of the mountain. And, you know, I think it's partly a way to bring parts of John into an experiential realm. And certainly as a Pentecostal, the idea of being in the spirit or having some sort of experience, it lent itself to constructing something like this.
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Jonathan Lookedew
Yeah, yeah, it really does. And it just shows the ongoing influence and inspiration that John provides and the way in which people are thinking about it and still using it in their art and religious practice. Well, the Gospel of John narrates Jesus appearance after the resurrection to Mary Magdalene. And Mary has had quite a rich reception history and later Christian literature. How was she portrayed by early Christians and then how did these portrayals surface in the late 20th century novels that you examine within your book?
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah, so, yeah, Mary Magdalene is. She herself has an incredible afterlife in terms of how she was understood by early Christians, what we can see. Okay, so one way to think about it is she's a figure that's very present in the Gospels, not just in John at the empty tomb. And yet if we look at something like, okay, the original ending of the Gospel of Mark has the women fleeing. They go out of the tomb and they don't say anything to anybody because they're afraid. Scribes came along and added things to that gospel to show that there was A sighting. And one of the things that they do is they make it clear that really the person who sees Jesus raised is going to be Peter. And so Mary Magdalene can have a role, but it really needs to be Peter. So we can see at a very early stage, course there are some stories where she appears in the Gospels, but from a very early stage of things we can see that Christian writers have. It's a mixed ception, I would say, of Mary Magdalene on the one hand, important as one of Jesus's followers, but not one of the 12, important as someone who sees the empty tomb, but not as important as Peter. What happens is, and with the Gospel of John, there's a very obscure character in there who's never fully named, called the Beloved Disciple, mentioned several times. And there were questions about who that beloved disciple was. Was the Beloved disciple John himself, John the Evangelist. There were some Christians again in the Gnostic realm who thought that that beloved disciple was Mary Magdalene. And they wrote gospels about it and, you know, kind of in a vivid way, in a vivid way tried to portray her as Jesus's most, in a way, most trusted disciple. But that was a very, very minor minority viewpoint. As far as we can tell. The primary way she comes to be understood is really emerges from a conflation of several different stories in the New Testament about Mary or else about the woman taken in adultery that's not named. She comes, Mary Magdalene comes to take on a status of, well, she's in subsequent history, not in the Gospels, but in subsequent history, she's viewed as a prostitute. She's viewed as penitent, you know, asking for forgiveness. She sometimes is viewed as an example of just how inclusive this faith could be, that it included somebody who was really so immoral and that Jesus forgave her. And so she's used in a lot of symbolic ways. Some of that we can see in the diverse depictions of her early on. But many of them just come to be to take on this kind of expanded story post New Testament. I mean, I think if one were to do a survey, of course you'd have to do it, a survey of people who know something about Mary Magdalene. But if you were to do a survey of what did you think? What's the first thing that comes to mind about who Mary Magdalene was? I would guess most people would say, oh, yes, she was a prostitute. She's never called that in the New Testament. We don't have any reason to think that that's what she was. But it comes from conflation of stories mixing Stories together, stories that don't have names, stories about other Marys. And she takes on this kind of Persona of the penitent sinner in subsequent Christian history. And yes, periodically there are. I mean, certainly in the Gnostic view, there was this idea that maybe she was the beloved disciple. I think among contemporary writers and feminist theologians, there's been an attempt to kind of retrieve something of Mary Magdalene as a model of discipleship, for example.
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Jonathan Lookedew
Interesting. Yeah. I used the word rich, I think, in my question. But layered just the different ways in which people see Mary Magdalene and then conflate her with. With other women characters. Female characters in. In other Gospels is. Yeah, very intriguing. We've covered just a fraction of. Of what's in this book because you really do cover a lot of ground very concisely in your book. But before we wrap up, can I ask, is there anything else you'd like listeners to take away from the Gospel of John, a biography?
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Kim Haynes Eitzen
Well, I think the main thing I really was trying to show in the book is that we have in the Gospel of John a gospel that comes to be the most beloved gospel by Christians throughout history. Martin Luther thought the Gospel of John and the Pauline letters, the letters of Paul, that was sufficient. You know, it had a very beloved status very early on. It begins in such a strikingly poetic way. There are so many features to it that are unique, that are not like the other gospels. So it has this, you know, unusual. Some very unusual features to it, including what's distinctive to it, but also including the fact that Christian writers, both Gnostic and Orthodox alike, use the Gospel of John frequently and extensively. And at the same time, it has these stories and language that are troubling and have been used to legit crusades or persecution of Jews. And it's. I think that that's. I guess the takeaway is to sort of make sense of what it means to be a scriptural religion. In my view, when you have a scriptural religion, it means that those who are, you know, those who are adherents of that religion. So Christians have to wrestle with a scripture that in a new time and place might have language that's very dissonant, that just feels really uncomfortable and trying to come to terms with that because I think Judaism, Christianity, Islam, as scriptural religions are always wrestling with a text. And they can't just ignore the text. Well, sometimes they ignore the text, but in general, they have to wrestle with it. They have to make sense of it. And I think of, you know, interpretation as incredibly, can be an incredibly. Even though it seems like I'm going to fix this interpretation. This is what it means, and it doesn't mean that. In fact, when you look at an interpretation, it becomes quite expansive. What church fathers, what, you know, other kinds of writers can do with that text. It's pretty expansive and how they can work with it. And I think that's, to me, the core of what I was trying to do in the book. And also what I find so fascinating is how does a book that just begins with in the beginning was the word. How does that go on to have such a complex and rich afterlife?
- [45:53]
Jonathan Lookedew
Really interesting, and thank you so much for bringing that out, Kim. I know we've taken a lot of your time today, but before we go, do you mind sharing a little bit about what you might be working on now and what we might look forward to from you in the future?
- [46:07]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Okay, yes, sure. So I'm working on a book about apocalypse, and it will touch on the book of Revelation in the New Testament. But really, I'm looking. We have a lot of apocalyptic material written by Jews and Christians that never made it into the Bible. And I'm interested in how those texts. Well, let me put it a different way. If we say, at least in my context here in North America, if we say the word apocalypse, almost everybody thinks it means the end. All caps. The end. And yet when we look at these ancient apocalyptic texts, which is where our ideas about apocalypse, where that comes from, they're not talking about the end. They're talking about suffering. They're talking about trials, tribulations, you know, a great deal of, you know, even a lot of violence. But the underpinning of that is very much about hope. It's like it's laying out, here's how the world is right now. But hold on, because things are going to change. So the book I'm working on is really about apocalypse as transformation. And yes, the kind of language in the book of Revelation says that New Earth, new heaven, new Earth. But I wanted to expand on that and to really understand what I guess the fundamental question is really, in a way, what is the way through the apocalypse and what are the possibilities for transformation to kind of reorient us away from the idea of apocalypse as end and understanding it more as something that can be passed through or walked through or crossed over and into some sort of transformation.
- [48:15]
Jonathan Lookedew
That sounds like a wonderful project and quite timely, I think, for how many people are feeling.
- [48:21]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
Yeah, exactly.
- [48:22]
Jonathan Lookedew
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing today about your. Your current work or the work that's just been finished the Gospel of John biography. And we're looking very forward to the to the work on Apocalypse as well. But we have been talking today, listeners, to Kim Haynes Eitzen about the Gospel of John, a biography. Thank you so much again, Kim, for being on the show.
- [48:45]
Kim Haynes Eitzen
You're welcome. It was a pleasure.
- [48:47]
Jonathan Lookedew
And thank you, listeners, for tuning in. Take care.