Lazarus of Bethany

• 1. Introduction

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  Lazarus of Bethany was already in his tomb when Jesus asked for the stone to be rolled away, and his sister Martha objected on practical grounds. There would be a smell, she warned. Her brother had been dead four days. Jesus had the stone moved anyway, and the Gospel of John says the man inside came out still wrapped in his grave-cloths. Few figures in the New Testament say so little and leave so much behind. Who was Lazarus, and why does John place his story exactly where he does? How did churches in Cyprus and in France each come to claim him as their first bishop? And how did the name of one man from a village near Jerusalem become shorthand for any return from the apparent end?

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• 2. A Friend Is Sick

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  Two sisters, Mary and Martha, sent Jesus a short message about their brother: "he whom thou lovest is sick." Lazarus lived in Bethany, near Jerusalem, and John introduces him as a follower of Jesus. Jesus answered that "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." Then, according to the narrator, he stayed where he was for two more days.

  The disciples were afraid of going back to Judea. Jesus told them, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep." The apostles took him literally, so he spoke plainly: "Lazarus is dead. And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe."

  When Jesus reached Bethany, Lazarus was already in the tomb. He met Martha first and then Mary. Martha greeted him with grief and a hint of reproach: "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." Jesus replied with one of the best-known lines in the gospel: "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." Martha answered that she believed he was the Christ, the Son of God. Soon afterward the narrator offers the shortest verse in the story, "Jesus wept."

  A crowd of Jewish mourners followed him to the tomb. When Martha protested, he asked her, "Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?" The stone was taken away. Jesus looked up and prayed, explaining that he spoke aloud for the sake of the people standing by. Then he called, "Lazarus, come forth!" Lazarus walked out, and Jesus asked someone to remove the grave-cloths and let him go.

  Many of the witnesses believed. Others hurried to report what they had seen to the religious authorities in Jerusalem, and their report would soon matter far more than the crowd's belief.

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• 3. Climax of the Signs

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  John arranges his gospel around seven signs, and the raising at Bethany is the climactic one. It is the last miracle Jesus performs before his passion, crucifixion and own resurrection. It is also the longest coherent narrative in the gospel apart from the Passion itself. One commentator quoted in the tradition describes it as showing his power over death, the last and most irresistible enemy of humanity.

  The consequences arrive quickly. Six days before the Passover on which Jesus is crucified, he returns to Bethany for a supper served by Martha, and Lazarus attends. Crowds take notice of both men. The narrator says the chief priests even considered putting Lazarus to death, because so many people were believing in Jesus on account of the miracle. The same event explains the crowds seeking Jesus on Palm Sunday. It also leads directly to the decision of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin to put Jesus on trial.

  The theologians Moloney and Harrington call it a "pivotal miracle." They describe it as a "resurrection that will lead to death," because the raising of Lazarus starts the chain of events that ends with the death of Jesus in Jerusalem.

  The Catechism of the Catholic Church stresses what the miracle was not. It returned Lazarus to ordinary earthly life, as happened with the son of the widow of Nain and with Jairus' daughter, and all of them would die again. The Russian Orthodox Catechism of St. Philaret simply lists the raising among the miracles of Jesus. A 2014 Southern Baptist resolution, On the Sufficiency of Scripture Regarding the Afterlife, notes that Scripture gives no report of what such people experienced after death.

  Other voices read the delay and the details. John Calvin wrote that Christ gave a proof of divine power and also placed before our eyes "a lively image of our future resurrection." The French Protestant minister Jakob Abbadie argued that Jesus waited so that no one could say Lazarus was not truly dead. Justus Knecht believed the miracle came just before the Passion so that the apostles would hope, when they saw the body laid in a sepulchre, that the one who raised Lazarus would rise himself.

  In 2008 Pope Benedict XVI said the story "shows Christ's absolute power over life and death." He added that Jesus' lordship over death does not stop him showing "sincere compassion over the pain of this separation." Roger Baxter noticed something smaller in his Meditations. The sisters did not tell Jesus what to do, and he took that as a model for prayer, since a loving friend needs only to be told of a need.

  Matthew Poole and others saw a second miracle in the way Lazarus could move while his hands and feet were bound. Charles Ellicott disputed that the burial garments would have held him back at all.

  The name itself carried meaning. Lazarus is the Greek form of the Hebrew Eleazar, which means "God has helped." Bede remarked that of all the dead the Lord raised, Lazarus was the one most helped.

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• 4. Doubts and Sources

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  In 1836 the deist Lysander Spooner pointed to a puzzle in the gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke say nothing about the raising of Lazarus, even though they mention his sisters. Spooner suggested the author of John was either "actually dishonest" or had recorded a rumor with no foundation. In 1892 the agnostic speaker Robert G. Ingersoll found the story historically implausible. He reasoned that a man who had died and returned would have had experiences more interesting than anything else in the New Testament, and he might have faced his second death with less fear than others.

  The Interpreter's Bible of 1953 was more measured. It said the gap between revival right after death and resurrection after four days is wide enough to raise doubts about historicity, especially given the details of verse 44. Yet it also found features in the story with "the marks of verisimilitude."

  Modern scholars ask how John composed the passage. Mark Goodacre and B. H. Streeter have argued that the evangelist may have drawn on the earlier Synoptic accounts. These include the anointing of Jesus at Bethany in Mark 14 and Matthew 26, the sinful woman's anointing in Luke 7, the visit to Martha and Mary in Luke 10, and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. On this view Lazarus replaced Simon the Leper, or Simon the Pharisee, as host of the feast, and Bethany in Judea became the setting.

  Verse 11:2 draws special attention. It mentions the anointing before John has narrated it, which is not mentioned until 12:3. Neither Mary, Martha, their village nor any anointing has appeared earlier, so the author seems to assume readers already know them. Elser and Piper, in 2006, took the verse as evidence of an "audacious attempt" to "rework the collective memory of the Christ-movement." In their reading John blended traditions for theological reasons, building Lazarus, Mary and Martha into a model Christian family.

  In 2023 Zangenberg doubted that John 11 depended on the Synoptic stories, calling the evidence insufficient. He also argued that John knows Jewish burial customs of the time accurately, as archaeology and ancient Jewish texts attest. Other scholars suggest a different reason for the silence. An early account behind the Synoptic gospels may have left characters anonymous because they were still alive and at risk, while John, writing much later, could name them.

  A similar resurrection story appears in the controversial Secret Gospel of Mark, though its young man is never named. Some scholars think that version preserves an earlier form of the story told in John.

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• 5. The Tomb at Bethany

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  Bethany is today the town of Al-Eizariya in the West Bank, a name that translates as "the place of Lazarus." The reputed first tomb of Lazarus there has drawn pilgrims for centuries. Visitors reach it by a flight of uneven rock-cut steps leading down from the street. A description from 1896 counts twenty-four steps to a square chamber used for prayer, with more steps down to a lower chamber believed to be the tomb. The same layout holds today.

  The historian Eusebius of Caesarea, around 330, and the Bordeaux pilgrim both mention the tomb. In 390 Jerome mentions a church dedicated to Saint Lazarus, called the Lazarium, and the pilgrim Egeria confirms it around 410. For that reason the church is thought to have been built between 333 and 390. Remnants of its mosaic floor survive in the present-day gardens. An earthquake destroyed the Lazarium in the 6th century, and a larger church replaced it. That church stood intact until the Crusader era.

  In 1143 King Fulk and Queen Melisende of Jerusalem bought the structure and its lands. They built a large Benedictine convent dedicated to Mary and Martha nearby. After the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 the convent was deserted and fell to ruin, leaving only the tomb and some barrel vaulting. By 1384 a simple mosque stood on the site. In the 16th century the Ottomans raised the larger al-Uzair Mosque for the now Muslim inhabitants and named it for the town's patron saint, Lazarus of Bethany.

  Adjacent to the tomb, the Roman Catholic Church of Saint Lazarus was designed by Antonio Barluzzi and built between 1952 and 1955 under the Franciscan Order. A Greek Orthodox church followed in 1965, just west of the tomb.

  Some scholars have questioned the location. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 mentions Zanecchia, who placed the ancient village higher on the southeastern slope of the Mount of Olives, near Bethphage. Its author called the identification of the cave as the tomb "merely possible" but believed the ancient village lay in the general area.

  The tomb at Bethany is not the only place that claims Lazarus, and other traditions say his later life unfolded far from Judea.

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• 6. Bishop of Two Coasts

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  Outside the Bible, nothing is recorded of Lazarus, so Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions fill the gap in different ways. One places him in Cyprus and the other in Provence.

  The Orthodox account says Lazarus fled Judea after rumoured plots on his life and came to Cyprus. There Barnabas and Paul the Apostle appointed him the first bishop of Kition, present-day Larnaca. He lived there thirty more years and was buried for the second and last time. The Virgin Mary was said to have woven his bishop's omophorion with her own hands and given it to him. Such apostolic links mattered to the bishops of Kition, who claimed self-government between 325 and 431. At the Third Ecumenical Council in 431 AD the church of Kition was declared self-governing.

  Tradition adds a haunting detail. Lazarus never smiled during those thirty years, troubled by the unredeemed souls he saw during his four days in Hell. He smiled only once, on seeing a man steal a pot, and said: "the clay steals the clay." The 15th-century poet Georges Chastellain drew on this image, imagining a man raised by grace who afterward knew only misery and painful thoughts.

  In 890 a tomb in Larnaca was found bearing the inscription "Lazarus the friend of Christ." Emperor Leo VI of Byzantium moved the remains to Constantinople in 898, and Arethas, bishop of Caesarea, praised the transfer. The Eastern Orthodox Church marks it each year on the 17th of October. To compensate Larnaca, Leo built the Church of St. Lazarus over the tomb, and the marble sarcophagus can still be seen under the Holy of Holies.

  In the 16th century a Russian monk from the Monastery of Pskov took a small piece of relic home, which may have led to a chapel at the Spaso-Eleazar Monastery. In November 1972, renovation workers under the altar at Larnaca found human remains in a marble sarcophagus, identified as part of the saint's relics. In June 2012 the Church of Cyprus gave part of them to a Russian Orthodox delegation led by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia. The relics went to the Zachatievsky monastery, where they were set out for veneration.

  The Western medieval tradition, centered in Provence, tells a different story. Lazarus, Mary and Martha were put out to sea by hostile Jews in a vessel without sails, oars or helm. After a miraculous voyage they landed at a place now called the Saintes-Maries. The family then split up to preach across southeastern Gaul, and Lazarus went to Marseille, converted many people, and became its first bishop. Under the persecution of Domitian he was imprisoned and beheaded in a cave beneath the prison Saint-Lazare.

  His body was later moved to Autun and buried in the cathedral dedicated to him as Saint Lazare. The people of Marseille claim they still hold his head. Pilgrims also visit another purported tomb at Vézelay Abbey in Burgundy. The Abbey of the Trinity at Vendôme was said to keep a tear Jesus shed at the tomb of Lazarus.

  The Golden Legend, compiled in the 13th century, records the Provençal tradition. It imagines a grand family background, with Lazarus, Martha and a sister identified as Mary Magdalene dividing castles and parts of Jerusalem among them. In that telling Lazarus devoted himself to knighthood, and Martha, wise and capable, governed all three shares.

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• 7. Feasts, Faiths, and a Beggar

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  Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday, is the principal day for Lazarus in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Catholic Church. It falls between the penitence of Great Lent and the mourning of Holy Week, and together with Palm Sunday it is a day of joy and triumph. During the preceding week, hymns in the Lenten Triodion follow his sickness and death and the journey of Christ to Bethany. The readings and hymns present the raising as a foreshadowing of Christ's Resurrection and a promise of the General Resurrection.

  The hymns also read the Gospel as showing two natures of Christ. His humanity appears when he asks, "Where have ye laid him?", and his divinity when he commands Lazarus to come forth. On the day itself, the Baptismal Hymn replaces the Trisagion at the Divine Liturgy. Although the forty days of Great Lent have ended, the fast continues in a milder form, and in Russia it is traditional to eat caviar. The Orthodox calendar also keeps a fixed feast on the 17th of March.

  On the General Roman Calendar, Lazarus shares a memorial on the 29th of July with his sisters Mary and Martha. The Church of England keeps the same day as a Lesser Festival under the title "Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, Companions of Our Lord." The Lutheran Church also commemorates all three that day. Earlier editions of the Roman Martyrology listed him on the 17th of December. In Cuba that date is a major festival for San Lázaro, with a pilgrimage to a chapel in the village of El Rincon, outside Havana.

  Lazarus also appears in medieval Islamic tradition as a pious companion of Jesus, though the Quran names no such figure. It does credit Jesus with raising the dead. The writer Al-Thaʿlabī, closely following John, related that Lazarus, called Al-ʿĀzir, died, that his sister sent for Jesus, and that Jesus raised him at the rock tomb. He added that children were born to him afterward. Ibn al-Athīr also calls the resurrected man "ʿĀzir."

  The Gospel of Luke has another Lazarus, a sore-covered beggar in the parable of the rich man, often called Dives. When the rich man begs from hell for Lazarus to warn his family, Abraham answers: "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." The beggar's feast day is the 21st of June.

  Over the centuries the two figures have sometimes been merged, and both are shown with sores and crutches. Romanesque portals in Burgundy and Provence may reflect the mix, including the west portal of St. Trophime at Arles, where the beggar is enthroned as Saint Lazarus. Similar carvings appear at Avallon, at the central portal of Vézelay and on the portals of Autun cathedral.

  The beggar also gave his name to the Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem, an order of chivalry that grew from a 12th-century leper hospital founded in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Sufferers of leprosy took the beggar as their patron saint. The same blending shaped Santería, where Lazarus became the Yoruba deity Babalu Aye. Believers wear silver crutch charms or Catholic-style medals to ask for help in medical suffering, particularly among people with AIDS.

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• 8. Lazarus in Culture

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  The raising of Lazarus appears in the Catacombs of Rome, including examples from the 2nd century. Sebastiano del Piombo painted it in 1516, and Caravaggio around 1609. Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Ivor Williams also depicted Lazarus, and Walter Sickert painted Lazarus Breaking His Fast.

  In Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick, Ishmael finishes writing his will and feels that every remaining day will be a clean gain, like the days Lazarus lived after his resurrection. In Dostoevsky's 1866 Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov asks Sonia to read the passage from John aloud, and he reads it again in the epilogue. Mark Twain wrote two short stories, published after his death in 1972, in which a lawyer argues that Lazarus' heirs had an indisputable claim to his property. Eugene O'Neill's 1925 play Lazarus Laughed, his largest-cast play, imagines Lazarus' life after the miracle. It has been produced in full only once.

  Whittaker Chambers opened his 1952 memoir Witness with the line "In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return." Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" appeared in Ariel in 1965. The allusions run through T.S. Eliot, Truman Capote, John Knowles and Leonid Andreyev, and through science fiction by Robert A. Heinlein, Walter M. Miller Jr. and Frank Herbert.

  Recent novels give Lazarus a voice. Richard Beard's Lazarus Is Dead, from 2011, builds on the idea that Jesus had many disciples but few friends and traces the pair back to a shared childhood in Nazareth. Richard Zimler's The Gospel According to Lazarus is narrated by Lazarus himself and presents Yeshua ben Yosef as an early Jewish mystic who was his lifelong best friend.

  Science borrowed the name too. A Lazarus taxon is a group of organisms that reappears in the fossil record after seeming to have gone extinct. Medicine speaks of the Lazarus sign and Lazarus syndrome.

  Music gave Lazarus many songs. Carman recorded "Lazarus Come Forth" in 1984, telling the story from Lazarus in heaven. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds titled an album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, and David Bowie wrote his song "Lazarus" while terminally ill.

  Politicians have been compared to him as well. When John Howard lost the leadership of the Liberal Party of Australia, he rated his chances of regaining it as "Lazarus with a triple bypass," and he went on to become Prime Minister. The journalist Amy Wilentz called Jean Bertrand Aristide the "Haitian Lazarus" after his return from exile.

  Popular fiction keeps borrowing him. In Batman comics, Ra's al Ghul is restored to life by the Lazarus Pit. The 2007 Doctor Who episode "The Lazarus Experiment" turns Professor Richard Lazarus into a life-force sucking monster. In the 2014 game The Binding of Isaac, the playable character Lazarus returns from death once on each floor.

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