Lazarus of Bethany

Based on Wikipedia: Lazarus of Bethany

The Man Who Died Twice

Imagine being dead for four days. Not unconscious, not in a coma—dead. Your body has begun to decompose. Your sisters have wept themselves hollow. The stone has been rolled across your tomb, and everyone who loved you has started the long, terrible work of learning to live without you.

Then someone calls your name, and you walk out.

This is the story of Lazarus of Bethany, and it remains one of the most extraordinary claims in all of religious literature. Whether you believe it happened literally, view it as theological symbolism, or dismiss it entirely, the narrative itself has echoed through two thousand years of human culture, shaping everything from religious doctrine to the scientific vocabulary we use when species thought extinct suddenly reappear.

The Setting: A Small Town Near Jerusalem

Bethany was a village about two miles east of Jerusalem, perched on the southeastern slope of the Mount of Olives. Today it's called Al-Eizariya, which translates directly to "the place of Lazarus"—a name that has clung to this patch of earth for millennia, testimony to how thoroughly one story can define a place.

In the Gospel of John, Lazarus lives here with his two sisters, Mary and Martha. Jesus knows this family well. The gospel makes clear they're close friends—the kind of friends who send urgent word when something goes terribly wrong.

And something has gone terribly wrong.

The Delay That Puzzles Everyone

When Jesus receives the message that Lazarus is gravely ill, he does something strange. He doesn't rush to his friend's bedside. Instead, he stays where he is for two more days.

The gospel writer frames this as intentional, not negligent. Jesus tells his followers that this sickness "is not unto death, but for the glory of God." When he finally announces they're going to Bethany, he says plainly: "Lazarus is dead. And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe."

Glad. The word sits uncomfortably in the narrative. His friend has died, and Jesus says he's glad he wasn't there to prevent it. Whatever is about to happen, it seems, requires Lazarus to be unambiguously, undeniably dead.

His disciples, meanwhile, are terrified for different reasons. Judea has become dangerous. Religious authorities there want Jesus arrested, possibly killed. Going back feels like walking into a trap. But Jesus is going anyway.

Four Days in the Tomb

The detail about four days matters enormously. In Jewish belief of the period, there was a popular notion that the soul lingered near the body for three days after death, perhaps hoping to return. After three days, decomposition would begin in earnest, the face would become unrecognizable, and the soul would depart for good.

Four days, then, is the point of no return. This isn't a coma. This isn't suspended animation. This isn't someone who merely appeared to be dead. Four days means the body has begun to rot. When Jesus arrives and asks for the stone to be removed from the tomb, Martha—ever the practical sister—objects: "Lord, by this time he stinketh."

It's a surprisingly earthy detail in a story about cosmic power over death.

The Sisters

Martha meets Jesus first, on the road outside the village. Her greeting carries both faith and reproach: "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." It's the cry of every grieving person who has ever wondered why help didn't come in time.

Jesus responds with words that would become one of the most quoted passages in Christianity: "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

Then he asks her a question: "Believest thou this?"

Martha says yes. She affirms that she believes he is the Messiah, the Son of God. But notice what happens next—she doesn't seem to expect him to actually do anything about her dead brother. She goes to fetch her sister Mary, and when Mary arrives, she echoes Martha's lament word for word: "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."

Mary is weeping. The Jewish mourners who have come to comfort her are weeping. And then comes the most famous short verse in the Bible.

"Jesus wept."

Two words that have launched a thousand theological debates. Why does someone with the power to reverse death cry at death's door? Is this genuine grief? Frustration at the crowd's lack of faith? Solidarity with human sorrow even as he prepares to end it? The text doesn't explain. It simply reports: he wept.

The Raising

They come to the tomb—a cave with a stone laid across its entrance, typical of Jewish burial practice in the period. Jesus orders the stone removed. Martha protests about the smell. Jesus reminds her of what he'd said about seeing the glory of God.

The stone is rolled away.

Jesus prays aloud—explicitly, he says, for the benefit of those watching, "that they may believe that thou hast sent me." Then he calls out in a loud voice: "Lazarus, come forth!"

And out walks a dead man, still wrapped in his burial cloths, strips of linen binding his hands and feet, a cloth covering his face. He has to shuffle or hop because he's still wrapped up like a mummy. Jesus gives one more instruction: "Loose him, and let him go."

That's it. That's the climax. No dramatic dialogue from the resurrected man, no description of what he experienced in death, no explanation of how this is possible. Just a man walking out of his tomb, trailing grave clothes, four days after he stopped breathing.

The Aftermath

The Gospel of John reports that many who witnessed this event believed in Jesus. Others ran to tell the religious authorities what had happened.

Here's where the story takes its darkest turn. According to John, the chief priests and Pharisees convene an emergency meeting. Their concern isn't whether the miracle is genuine—they seem to accept that it happened—but what it means politically. If everyone starts believing in Jesus, the Romans might view this as a threat to public order and crack down on the entire nation.

The high priest Caiaphas makes an argument that has echoed through history whenever authorities have justified violence against individuals for the supposed greater good: "It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."

From that day forward, John tells us, they plotted to kill Jesus. And not just Jesus—chapter twelve reports that the chief priests also wanted to kill Lazarus, because his continued living, breathing existence kept convincing people that Jesus had real power.

Think about that for a moment. They wanted to kill a man because he was alive and shouldn't be.

What Happened to Lazarus?

The Gospel of John gives us one more glimpse of Lazarus. Six days before the Passover on which Jesus would be crucified, Jesus returns to Bethany for dinner. Lazarus is there, reclining at the table. His sister Martha is serving. His other sister Mary anoints Jesus's feet with expensive perfume, then wipes them with her hair—a scene that would generate its own centuries of interpretation and artistic representation.

But Lazarus himself? He just sits there at dinner. The man who came back from the dead has nothing to say, or at least nothing the gospel writer recorded. It's one of the great silences of the New Testament.

Later traditions tried to fill this silence. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Lazarus is venerated as "Righteous Lazarus, the Four-Days Dead." According to one tradition, he became the first Bishop of Kition in Cyprus, where he lived for another thirty years after his resurrection, never smiling once because he had seen the state of unredeemed souls in the afterlife. Another tradition places his later ministry in Marseille, France, where his supposed relics were eventually housed.

The Catholic and Orthodox churches disagree on these later details, but they agree on the fundamental point: Lazarus died twice. Whatever the resurrection gave him, it wasn't immortality. He simply got more time—decades more, according to tradition—before facing death again.

The Theological Stakes

Why does this story matter so much to Christian theology? Partly because of its placement in the Gospel of John's structure.

John organizes his gospel around what scholars call the "seven signs"—miraculous events that reveal who Jesus is. The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and final sign before the Passion narrative begins. It's the culmination, the crescendo, the moment where Jesus demonstrates power not just over disease or nature or demons, but over death itself.

And it's explicitly connected to what comes next. John makes clear that this miracle is what sets the crucifixion in motion. The same power that calls a dead man out of a tomb is what makes the authorities decide Jesus must die. Life leads to death leads—Christians believe—to resurrection.

There's also a theological distinction worth noting. According to Catholic teaching, what happened to Lazarus is different from what Christians expect at the end of time. Lazarus was restored to ordinary earthly life. He would age again. He would die again. This is resuscitation, not resurrection in the full theological sense. The resurrection Christians anticipate is transformation into an imperishable state.

Lazarus, in this view, got a preview and a second chance, but not the final thing. He got more life. Not eternal life.

The Problem of Silence

Here's something that has puzzled readers for centuries: the other gospels don't mention this event.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke—the three Synoptic Gospels, so called because they share a similar perspective—include nothing about Lazarus being raised from the dead. They mention Jesus raising other people: Jairus's daughter, who had just died, and the son of the widow of Nain, whose funeral procession Jesus interrupted. But a man four days dead, whose resurrection was so public and so controversial that it led directly to Jesus's arrest? Nothing.

Scholars have proposed various explanations. Some argue that the Synoptic Gospels were written while Lazarus was still alive and deliberately protected his identity because he was in danger. John, written later, could include the full story because by then Lazarus had died of natural causes and was beyond the reach of persecution.

Others suggest John created or elaborated the story for theological purposes, combining elements from other traditions—the sisters Martha and Mary appear elsewhere in Luke, in a completely different context, with no brother mentioned and no connection to Bethany near Jerusalem.

Still others point to the "Secret Gospel of Mark," a controversial fragment discovered in the twentieth century that contains a resurrection narrative strikingly similar to the Lazarus story, though the young man in it remains unnamed. This fragment's authenticity has been hotly debated; some scholars believe it represents an earlier version of the story that John later expanded, while others dismiss it as a modern forgery.

The silence remains uncomfortable. If this happened, why don't the other gospels mention it? If it didn't happen, what are we to make of John's detailed, circumstantial narrative?

The Skeptic's Question

The nineteenth-century agnostic orator Robert Ingersoll posed a question that still resonates: If Lazarus really died and really came back, wouldn't his testimony be the most interesting thing in the entire New Testament?

What was death like? Was there consciousness? Was there judgment? Was there anything at all? Lazarus presumably knew the answer to the question that haunts every human being who has ever lived. And yet he says nothing. The gospels record nothing. He goes back to having dinner with his sisters as if he'd merely recovered from an illness rather than returned from non-existence.

The Southern Baptist Convention addressed this directly in a 2014 resolution, noting that among the Bible's accounts of people raised from the dead, "in God's perfect revelatory wisdom, He has not given us any report of their individual experience in the afterlife." The silence, in this view, is intentional—God chose not to reveal those details, and we shouldn't expect the Bible to satisfy our curiosity about them.

But Ingersoll's question lingers. If someone you knew came back from the dead, wouldn't you ask them what it was like?

A Name That Refuses to Die

Whatever you make of the historical question, the cultural impact is undeniable. "Lazarus" has become a word that transcends its origin.

In paleontology, a "Lazarus taxon" refers to organisms that disappear from the fossil record for millions of years and then reappear, as if risen from extinction. The coelacanth is the famous example—a fish thought to have died out sixty-six million years ago, found swimming in the Indian Ocean in 1938.

In medicine, "Lazarus syndrome" describes the spontaneous return of circulation after failed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The "Lazarus sign" is a spinal reflex that can occur in brain-dead patients, causing the arms to rise and fold across the chest in a movement that looks disturbingly like the person is trying to sit up.

In literature, Lazarus appears everywhere from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment—where the story is read aloud at a pivotal moment—to Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus," to David Bowie's album "Lazarus," released just days before the singer's death from cancer in 2016.

The name has become a shorthand for return from apparent extinction, for second chances, for the uncanny moment when something everyone thought was gone comes back.

Two Lazaruses

There's one more thing worth knowing: the New Testament actually contains two different characters named Lazarus.

The other one appears in a parable that Jesus tells in the Gospel of Luke—the story of the rich man and Lazarus. In this story, a wealthy man lives in luxury while a poor beggar named Lazarus sits at his gate, covered in sores, hoping for scraps from the rich man's table.

Both men die. Lazarus goes to "Abraham's bosom"—a place of comfort in the afterlife. The rich man goes to Hades, a place of torment. Looking across the gulf between them, the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers about what awaits them if they don't change their ways.

Abraham refuses. "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."

That line hangs in the air when you read both stories together. In Luke's parable, someone rising from the dead wouldn't convince the skeptics. In John's gospel, someone rising from the dead convinces many—but also accelerates the determination of others to kill both the one who raised and the one who was raised.

The two Lazaruses aren't explicitly connected in the text. But their juxtaposition raises questions the gospels don't answer. What does it take to believe? What would convince you? And if nothing would, what does that say about the nature of belief itself?

The Tomb Today

You can still visit the traditional site of Lazarus's tomb in Al-Eizariya. It's been a place of pilgrimage for at least seventeen hundred years—the historian Eusebius mentioned it around 330 CE, and churches have stood on or near the site since at least the late fourth century.

Today the tomb itself is inside a mosque, the al-Uzair Mosque, which has occupied the site since the sixteenth century. Adjacent to it stands a Roman Catholic church dedicated to Saint Lazarus, built in the 1950s on the foundation of much older churches. A Greek Orthodox church was added nearby in 1965.

To enter the tomb, you descend a flight of uneven, rock-cut steps from street level. Twenty-four steps bring you to a square chamber used for prayer. More steps lead down to a lower chamber—the traditional tomb itself.

Is this the actual place where Lazarus was buried? Archaeology can't confirm it. The site has been continuously venerated for so long that any original archaeological context has been thoroughly disturbed. What we can say is that people have been coming here to remember this story, to pray, to wonder, for at least as long as the Roman Empire has been gone.

The stone is no longer there, of course. Neither are the grave cloths. Just a cave, and stairs, and the weight of all those centuries of people asking the same questions.

The Question That Remains

Did it happen?

For believers, the raising of Lazarus is a preview of the resurrection that awaits all who believe—evidence that death, however final it seems, does not have the last word.

For skeptics, it's a story that grew in the telling, perhaps based on a kernel of real events, perhaps entirely invented for theological purposes, but in either case not a literal account of a literal miracle.

For historians, it's a puzzle: a story with detailed local color and convincing narrative elements, but also strange silences and contradictions with other sources, impossible to verify and difficult to explain away.

For all of us, regardless of where we stand on these questions, it remains one of the most vivid scenes in all of Western literature. The weeping sisters. The stone rolled away. The stench Martha warns about. The loud voice calling a name into the darkness of a tomb. And then, against all reason and expectation, the dead man walking out, still tangled in his burial cloths, blinking in the light.

"Loose him," Jesus says, "and let him go."

Whatever else it may be, it's a story about someone getting a second chance. About life being stronger than death, at least for a while. About the possibility—wild, improbable, desperately hoped for—that the people we've lost aren't lost forever.

That may be why the name refuses to die.