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For John Berryman, New Testament Scholarship and the Quest for the Historical Jesus in Particular Was a Major Personal As Well As Academic Preoccupation

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For John Berryman, New Testament Scholarship and the Quest for the Historical Jesus in Particular Was a Major Personal As Well As Academic Preoccupation THE LIFE OF BERRYMAN’S CHRIST TOM ROGERS For John Berryman, New Testament scholarship and the quest for the historical Jesus in particular was a major personal as well as academic preoccupation. The most dedicated of his numerous works that draw on the subject is his unpublished, and very much unfinished, “Life of Christ”: an unintentionally long-term prose project that he refers to as his “labour of love”.1 After many false starts, Berryman made most headway on the project during the last year of his life, completing two chapters before his death in 1972. As archival material and published poetry reveals, however, he always maintained an ambition and enthusiasm for the Christ project that continually outweighed his achievement, at least in the form of a finished product. This essay describes the evolution of the work as far as it is realized; it looks at the particular critics who inspired it, certain of whom were as important and influential to Berryman as his favorite literary heroes, and it also demonstrates the way the poet often draws on issues raised by New Testament criticism as material for his poetry, particularly for his most famous work, The Dream Songs. Although he made no important scholarly contribution to the field of Christology, besides his teaching, he does offer us in certain Dream Songs a profound and entertaining artistic treatment of the problem of the historical Jesus, and, most importantly, its consequences for personal faith. It is this poetic achievement that finally led to a breakthrough in the writing of his prose biography of “the most interesting man who has lived”.2 1 John Berryman, “The Life of Christ”, unpublished typescript, Miscellaneous Prose, Box 6, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Subsequent references will be abbreviated JBP. 2 John Berryman, Preface to “The Life of Christ” (c. 1956), manuscript sheet, JBP. 174 Tom Rogers In his 1971 poem “The Search” Berryman describes his “historical study of the Gospel” as being prompted by an existential crisis: I wondered ever too what my fate would be, women & after-fame become quite unavailable, or at best unimportant. For a tooth-extraction gassed once, by a Russian woman in Detroit, I dreamed a dream to end dreams, even my dreams: I had died—no problem: but a mighty hand was after my works too, feeling here & there, & finding them, bit by bit. At last he found the final of all one, & pulled it away, & said ‘There!’ I began the historical study of the Gospel indebted above all to Guignebert & Goguel & McNeile & Bultmann even & later Archbishop Carrington. (CP 198-99) Disillusioned with the worldly pursuits he describes in the first two parts of Love & Fame, particularly the notion of immortalizing oneself through writing, the poet (parodically echoing the opening to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress) sets out on an academic pilgrimage to find the truth. His lost sense of self-sufficiency is replaced by a disturbing feeling of absolute dependency for which he now wants answers. As he suggests in the poem, despite surveying “other systems, high & primitive, / ancient & surviving” (CP 200), his quest to unravel life’s purpose is from the start focused on the question of whether the claims of Christianity have any credence; in other words, “is Jesus Christ the person Christianity claims he is?” As Christian belief rests on the conviction that God, through the Incarnation, has specially intervened in human history, Berryman looks to the discipline of historical criticism as the most credible source of justification for any decision in the direction of faith. There does appear to be a creative ellipsis in his recounting of this journey in “The Search”. The incident in Detroit almost certainly refers to his brief, disastrous stay in the city during 1939-40, while teaching at Wayne University, Michigan: a period when his grip on reality .
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