Lazarus is Dead

by Richard Beard

  In Nazareth they were outsiders, and these are the friendships that survive. The local boys liked to taunt them, but Lazarus and Jesus rarely came to harm because they were lucky. Lazarus believed they were born lucky, the only two boys to escape the massacre in Bethlehem, and both from the line of David.

  This meant that David begat Solomon begat Roboam begat Abia, forty-two generations back to Abraham, and that at some upcountry confluence both Joseph and Eliakim’s families joined by a minor tributary into that principal river of distinguished names. Arriving from Egypt it also meant that both families could claim a tribal welcome in Nazareth, a proudly Davidian village.

  Hard to get luckier than that.

  Nazareth seemed designed for an idyllic childhood. Prosperous, agricultural, the region was neither too wild nor too civilised. To the north were bandits, allegedly, and Romans were garrisoned in the south. But in Nazareth itself it was easy to believe that if people were kind, life could be sweet and endless. Everyone would live forever.

  For Lazarus and Jesus the world was figs and cold water, soft blankets at night and sunrise through half-opened eyes. On the best days of summer the sky filled with cloud, bringing shade and the promise of rain, and whatever Lazarus did, Jesus did next. They climbed the timber delivered to Joseph’s workshop, scrambling up tree trunks and testing their balance. Lazarus climbed higher. Amos jumped up and down, scraped his knees when he tried to follow.

  There were accidents. Lazarus and Jesus fell out of the same olive tree, one after the other, and had very similar bruises. Lazarus caught a cold and passed the sickness to Jesus. The boys always recovered, and Menachem the Nazareth Rabbi told them they were indestructible, as strong as mules. None of the native children had bones as solid or constitutions as strong.

  Nor was anyone else as receptive at synagogue. Menachem had high hopes for both these boys, almost as high as they had for themselves. Between the two of them all ambitions seemed achievable. They spent long afternoons developing unchecked childish dreams: friends until the end of time, they’d wear golden sandals and have angels to buckle them.

  ‘What was the last thing he said to you?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  Jesus had promised to visit them in Bethany. He never had.

  ‘What I dislike most is pretence of any kind. Including the kind they’re calling miracles. How do these unbelievable stories spread?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m not involved.’ Lazarus could see that Isaiah was sceptical, and at that moment he wished he and Jesus had never met. ‘He was a small boy with scabs on his knees. Like the rest of us. He couldn’t even swim.’

  ‘God is not whimsical,’ Isaiah had said, and the massive columns of Solomon’s Porch appeared to support this opinion. ‘He doesn’t visit his chosen on earth to play games, to point his finger and pick out this one and then that one for the better portions of luck. You need to think clearly, Lazarus. Jesus is not universally liked.’

  ‘I know, I know. He creeps round those tiny villages. The stories aren’t remotely credible.’

  ‘And if he comes to Jerusalem?’

  ‘He wouldn’t last a minute, I promise you. He’s a provincial nobody. He has no idea how the world works.’

  ‘And you’d teach him a thing or two about Jerusalem, wouldn’t you, Lazarus? How to overprice sheep and hide their blemishes. The secret shortcut to Lydia’s house. Are you trying to protect him?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for years. But I’d advise him to trust no one.’

  Lazarus had then registered what Isaiah was saying. How did he know about Lydia? He decided to carry on regardless, because his headache made him irritable. ‘Not even his disciples, not in Jerusalem. Trust no one here but me.’

  ‘Yes, Lazarus, talk to me about the disciples. You’re his friend. Explain how it is that you’re not included in the twelve.’

  Lazarus had confessed to their childhood friendship out of vanity. Not long after, Jesus had selected his disciples.

  ‘I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.’ Mary was perfecting a wide-eyed look born of too much hope and not enough attention to housework.

  ‘He’s making me look stupid.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll pick you later.’ Jesus had chosen twelve, like the tribes. Lazarus was excluded, barely a friend of Jesus any more, and everyone now knew that and it hurt.

  ‘Some people say he’s the son of god,’ Mary added.

  ‘He’s the son of Mary. We grew up in the same house. You were there, remember?’

  The disciples were practically strangers to Jesus. Also, they were incredibly slow. They needed every story repeated, every lesson explained with exemplary images from their simple peasant lives.

  ‘Fishermen,’ Lazarus said. ‘They carry around that smell. Rotting fish. In the webs between their fingers.’

  Lazarus was more worthy as a friend and ally. After synagogue he and Jesus used to play David and Goliath. Lazarus was Goliath so Amos could be David while Jesus did both the armies. At the climax of an epic battle, involving whatever weapons came to hand, Lazarus could die quite brilliantly.

  Death was always a shock to him, a slingshot out of nowhere right between the eyes. He stared blindly, appalled. His hands clasped his forehead, his body stiffened and revolved until, rigid, he keeled stone dead to the ground.

  They sat together, knelt together, ate together. The other Nazareth children were dullards, or girls. Unlike Lazarus and Jesus, none of them could appreciate the living excitement of the scriptures: there was always one hero missing, the one yet to come.

  ‘Isn’t that right, Rabbi? The prophets know the story isn’t finished.’

  ‘They know the future is more interesting than the past,’ Menachem replied. ‘Even when the past is fascinating.’

  The Rabbi was delighted by their application to the Torah. His eyesight was failing (glaucoma, trachoma, conjunctivitis), but he liked to bring his face close to theirs to feel whatever was exceptional about these two exiled boys from Bethlehem. He could never quite decide what it was.

  Lazarus felt he was special. It was common knowledge that he’d been reprieved from the massacre of the innocents, and around the time of his birth a star had shone brightly in the sky. Lazarus could run faster and swim further and climb higher than any boy in Nazareth, and he knew by heart the heroes from scripture responsible for making yesterday become today.

  He believed in heroism like he did in living forever. The great prophets of the bible were undeterred by obstacles. They rarely fell sick, but he was sure that sickness would barely intrude on their working day.

  Lazarus, however, has not lived the life of a prophet. As a young man he left Nazareth to work as a sheep trader to the Temple, but somehow he has stalled as an overseer living with his sisters in a semi-rural village. He had expected more of himself. At the age of thirty-two he has mislaid his imagined greatness, but he still feels able to perform a great task. Only none has so far presented itself.

  3.

  A man destined to be a disciple would have stayed put in the slow sure village of Nazareth. He’d have trained as a stonemason like his father before him, married and had many children he’d apprentice in their turn as masons.

  Lazarus had never been much of a follower, so his friendship with Jesus presupposes some other purpose. It was widely known at the time that they were friends, a fact reported in the Gospel of John. If nothing else, their friendship can clarify time lines in this decisive period of the Jesus story.

  In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus is active for about a year between his baptism by John the Baptist in the River Jordan and his death by crucifixion in Jerusalem. John lengthens this period to three years, but the respected biblical scholar E. P. Saunders, in The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993), supports the consensus that the earlier three gospels are probably correct.

  I agree. Lazarus falls ill at the time of the first miracle at the wedding in Cana. Surely he wouldn’t have been made to suffer for three fu
ll years? Not if he was truly a friend, not if New Testament friendship is to mean anything. The illness of Lazarus therefore lasts about a year, from Passover to Passover, from the water-into-wine until his predetermined death ten days before the crucifixion of Jesus.

  He has less than twelve months to live, and counting.

  Over the next few weeks, after his inconclusive meeting with Isaiah, his illness makes itself known in the usual way: Lazarus has flu-like symptoms. He has a dry mouth, an ongoing headache and a general sense of fatigue. His teeth hurt.

  Also, his eyes can water when he thinks kindly of other people. He finds himself feeling sorry for the poor defenceless lambs Faruq brings in from the desert, and for himself.

  Obviously this can’t go on, so he makes a survey of his sins that need forgiving. There’s the Sabbath, which he doesn’t always respect, and the truth, which he doesn’t always tell. But business is business. There’s Lydia. He hasn’t married her when he promised he would, though not recently and never in the presence of witnesses. He shaves and he cuts his hair short, even though the Book of Leviticus clearly states (19:27) ‘Do not cut the hair of the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.’

  Lazarus brazenly flouts this scriptural law. We must imagine he is as careless with others, especially as disobeying biblical laws hasn’t done him any apparent harm. At thirty-two years old he is accepted and respected in his adoptive village of Bethany. He has profitable working relationships and his skilful trading has made him rich. Lazarus does not truly believe that an almighty god cares whether or not he shaves.

  It would be too strong to say that Lazarus doesn’t believe in god. At the time this would be like not believing in bread, or the sky. More accurate to suggest that as well as praying he likes to plan. He gets better results that way.

  He intends to continue the upward curve of his life by marrying the daughter of a serving member of the Sanhedrin ruling council. In order to achieve this, he needs to demonstrate to Isaiah the transience of his friendship with Jesus, who has only himself to blame. He should have visited Lazarus in Bethany. He shouldn’t have betrayed their ambitions by staying behind in Nazareth, doing what his father did.

  Lazarus can almost convince himself that the correct way to behave is to do the opposite of whatever his former friend would advise. He decides to follow standard religious procedure, thereby showing his disdain for new ways of thinking. He will offer lambs for sacrifice at the Temple.

  God can then feel free to grant him his wish to marry Saloma, Isaiah’s daughter. At the same time he can cure Lazarus of whatever illness is slowing him down. Or, more accurately, out of gratitude for the sacrifice, god will stop punishing him with illness for the sins he keeps committing.

  Isaiah will be impressed. And as a remedy for sickness, there is evidence that sacrifice works. On a previous occasion, when his flu-like symptoms developed into flu, Lazarus offered up a sacrifice and recovered within a week.

  They used to play hide-and-seek. It was more fun if Amos did the finding. At the age of four or five Amos would doggedly search in every obvious place, then start again from the beginning. The older boys shouted out ‘Here I am!’ and then pretended they hadn’t said anything, as if the message had descended from the sky.

  Lazarus kept score, and at this, like every other game, he won more often than he lost. He even competed at sunsets, sitting beside Jesus on the hill behind the village. The two boys looked out over the plain below, arms up, waiting for the exact moment the sun dipped finally beneath the horizon. They always missed it. It was light, then dark. The plain was a visible blackness, and then it was simply black, and night had stolen in.

  This made them late getting home, where Martha and Mary would rush to the gate to scold them. Lazarus didn’t care, because among ten-year-olds in Nazareth he was the brightest star in the sky. In the fresh upland air he grew strong and quick, sharp and solid, ready for the buffeting of the world.

  Jesus as a child was unremarkable. This must be so, because from his childhood he leaves behind no significant trace—the gospels contain a solitary reference, in Luke. At the age of twelve Jesus visits Jerusalem with his parents. He gets lost.

  Elsewhere there are attempts to fill the gap, notably in the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (about 150 CE). In this imagined childhood Jesus can purify drinking water, as if by magic, and mould clay into twelve living sparrows. He ‘withers’ a child for no good reason, and kills another for barging into him in the street. He heals a man who drops an axe on his own foot, and brings a child back to life who falls from a second-floor window.

  Thomas validates these miracles by specifying that ‘there were also many other children playing with him’, and these childhood friends presumably act as witnesses. If this were true, then Lazarus must have been one of the watching children, because he and Jesus were always together. That’s how everyone knew they were friends.

  Yet the failure to name Lazarus in these stories is not the only reason the Gospel of Thomas is sidelined as Apocryphal, meaning ‘of uncertain authenticity’. Thomas is omitted from the canonical books of the bible because he makes a basic theological mistake, known as the Docetist heresy. If Jesus can perform miracles as a child, then his earthly body only seems to be physical. If he has divine powers from the outset, he is never truly human. He wouldn’t have missed food or sleep. He wouldn’t have needed friends.

  The Bethany road to Jerusalem enters the city at the Sheep Gate, close to today’s Lion Gate. Leave the village, walk past the cemetery, down and up the first valley, over the ridge and descend the Mount of Olives to the narrow Kidron Stream. About a hundred metres short of the city walls, climb the steep paved approach. On the right-hand side, the road overlooks the pool of Bethesda.

  Lazarus trades twelve months a year with the Temple. He therefore looks down at the Bethesda pool on a regular basis. Archaeological findings have since confirmed that the pool is a double rectangular reservoir, with colonnades along five of the eight sides. From his elevated vantage point on the Bethany road, breathing deeply and shading his eyes, Lazarus can pick out the sick and dying gathered in the covered porches. This is where they come when they lose the ability to reason, and their only hope is a miracle cure.

  Over the years Lazarus has witnessed some spectacular demons. At Bethesda, contortions can be good entertainment, as is public nakedness and random cursing at the skies. There’s always the chance of seeing the water tremble as an angel passes by, which is the signal for the sick to rush madly towards the water. It is a race, because first into the pool will be cured.

  As a divine provision for helping those genuinely in need, this is blatantly unfair. The least sick have the vigour to jump in first, and they are the ones who are healed. Lazarus has always wanted to haul someone forward from the back, but life isn’t like that. The first will be first.

  However fragile he feels, Lazarus now makes regular trips to Jerusalem and ensures that Isaiah sees him handing a pair of his finest lambs to the Temple guards, one for the priests and one for god. The lambs are a public apology for being friends with Jesus, and therefore for causing Isaiah and his daughter embarrassment, and Lazarus looks a convincing penitent. He is pale, sometimes shivering. When he leaves the Courtyard of the Priests, he smothers his cough in his hand and wipes his eyes, which water constantly as if he’s crying.

  Lazarus endures.

  For two months he is a man with a headache and the sweats who sets a solid example, sacrificing a pair of sheep every other day at ruinous prices. Sometimes he offers up a lamb with an eye infection or a scar on the muzzle. An imperfection or two is neither here nor there, whatever the priests say, and the sacrifice is for his own benefit so he’s prepared to take the risk. He lets his hair grow. He doesn’t shave.

  Eventually Isaiah approaches him as he leaves the inner Temple.

  Lazarus bows low. He coughs, hacks it out from the centre of his chest, his tongue a deep gully to channel the phlegm. He spits to
one side, puts his hand to his flitting heart.

  ‘Your remorse has been most impressive,’ Isaiah says. ‘Almost worthy of a son-in-law. You are a lucky man. I’ve found a way you can make amends.’

  Lazarus bites his tongue. He’s doing as much as he can.

  ‘Be here tomorrow after dawn prayer. The Sanhedrin have new questions about Jesus. Don’t be late.’

  2.

  The priests will want to know if Jesus is capable of performing miracles. The answer is: he wasn’t even best at synagogue.

  Not always.

  He was the best at laws. Jesus learned by rote from the books of Solomon and Maccabees, and at classes in the Nazareth synagogue he could discuss texts like Daniel 12:2–3 (Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise./O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!).

  When it came to scriptural law, Lazarus conceded defeat. The laws bored him. He preferred the lions.

  Here they come. Their yellowed teeth are deadly as they stalk their den towards Daniel.

  Lazarus was best at stories and heroes, the first with every answer as if he were actually there. Here comes the whale. Throw Jonah over. The bad luck he brings to the ship will sink, but the man himself will live, three days and nights in the belly of the beast.

  Here comes Delilah. She cuts his hair and he loses his strength, but that comes later. Samson’s weapon of choice is the jaw of an ass. Ask Lazarus. Ask him about Saul back from the dead to visit King Samuel: ‘Why have you disturbed me?’ he said. ‘Why did you make me come back?’ (1 Samuel 28:15).

  And beyond the synagogue it is Lazarus who knows what boys should do. They run up hillsides shouting out loud. They climb into olive trees, throw stones at birds but always miss, look north to Mount Hermon and vow that one day they’ll climb to the top, if it’s the last thing they ever do.

  He and Jesus make a thousand promises. They will never desert each other, however great the danger.