In Nazareth, as a boy, Lazarus taught Jesus everything he needed to know. During his last week in Jerusalem, Jesus is still learning: life can be awkward the second time around. He exits the tomb and disappears.
In forty days from now, Jesus will ascend into heaven, his afterlife consistent with the pattern of his friendship with Lazarus. Jesus lets Lazarus go first. He pays attention. Then he does what Lazarus did, only better.
Cassius summons the soldiers charged with guarding the tomb. His lips are thin with rage but he lets them speak. Not one of them can give a reliable account of what has taken place.
In Mark, there is ‘a young man dressed in a white robe’ (Mark 16:5) who somehow infiltrates the tomb. Cassius has the soldiers flogged. They add an angel—‘His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow’ (Matthew 28:3).
Cassius seizes the flagellum himself and strikes hard behind the knees. Now there are ‘two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning’ (Luke 24:4).
‘So which is it? One man or two? Angels or men? Young or old? You will tell me the truth.’
When the story changes to ‘two angels, in white’ (John 20:12), Cassius turns and flails the wall, leaving the whip embedded in the plaster, at the centre of its own explosion of blood.
What is certain is that the body of Jesus is no longer in the tomb. Cassius urgently needs to find either the body or the man, for his own career and his own safety, but suddenly no one is even sure what Jesus looks like.
He is bearded, everyone agrees on that. But then he is encircled by a bright light, and Mary Magdalene who knows him well mistakes him at the empty tomb for a labourer—‘Thinking he was a gardener, she said: Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him’ (John 20:15).
Cassius has every gardener in the city arrested. None of them are the resurrected Jesus. And then a strange story filters in from travellers using the Emmaus road: ‘As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognising him’ (Luke 24:15–16). Cassius combines the uncertain descriptions with the consistent cases of mistaken identity. Jesus is in disguise.
Not that anyone knows where he is.
Cassius mobilises every soldier in the garrison to search for an escaped criminal. Whatever his outward appearance, he will be limping and possibly bleeding. Shouldn’t that be true? Cassius wants to check with Yanav, but Yanav too is missing.
If in doubt, the man they’re looking for will smell of myrrh and aloes.
He won’t get far. Checkpoints are double-manned. The sick are stopped at the city gates and searched.
Cassius cancels the Lazarus miracle at Bethesda. Instead he sends experienced legionnaires to raid the porches and turn out the invalids. Jesus is not found hiding among them.
Everyone pretends to be surprised. That’s one common thread. Jesus’s family and the disciples feign amazement at the empty tomb, but Cassius doesn’t trust them. To disappear so efficiently, Jesus must have made extensive preparations. This is a meticulously planned operation, and the work of more than one person.
If nothing else, the story of Lazarus has taught Cassius that Jesus uses his friends to achieve his objectives. Lazarus has questions to answer.
From Sunday morning the Lazarus story begins to fade. Lazarus has the star-bright birth in Bethlehem and the sheltered childhood in Nazareth. He comes from the line of David and enters Jerusalem on a donkey—but not elegantly, nor at the head of a procession, not in a way that three out of four gospel writers will choose later to remember.
For Lazarus, too many of the telling details are absent: the virgin-birth mother and the spectacular public death and the words to explain his experience. Nor does Lazarus ever understand the significance of hide-and-seek—he seeks when he should be hiding, and hides when he should seek.
Over the next forty days Jesus will make a limited number of appearances. The gospels have reports of Jesus with the disciples (behind locked doors, for security reasons), where he shows them his open wounds. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul states that Jesus appeared to Peter, to the twelve apostles together, to more than five hundred followers at once, to James, and then once more to the apostles.
This last appearance, as noted by Paul, is probably the same as the story Matthew and John tell of Jesus on the shore of Lake Galilee. The disciples have been night-fishing, but as dawn breaks they have nothing to show for their efforts. Jesus appears on the shore, too far away to help. He shouts at them to fish differently, to throw their nets on the unconventional side of the boat. That’s where they find what they’re looking for.
On the beach Jesus lights a fire. They cook fish and they eat. Jesus offers them bread. On the rare occasions he does make himself known, Jesus, like Lazarus, is hungry.
Cassius attempts to use the disciples as a lure. He allows them their freedom because whenever Jesus appears the disciples are never far away. He has every disciple followed, and the entire garrison looking for a wounded bearded man, but Jesus continues to elude him.
Not so Joseph of Arimathea. He swears he is simply a friend, no more nor less. Cassius spits in his eye. Joseph of Arimathea is never heard from again.
As for Lazarus, it is inconceivable that he isn’t implicated. At the very least he advised on how to survive inside a tomb, and Cassius will not forgive him.
In the Antonia Fortress, in a small cell on the third floor, Cassius has the bed carried out. Lazarus will not be sleeping.
‘Admit you’re a fraud. Why did you pretend to come back to life?’
Cassius uses the whips, the weights, the flames. Lazarus screams like anyone else, and then Cassius has him killed with saws. His hands and his feet are cut off, and he is beheaded. The body parts are kept separate and as far apart as possible on the floor of the cell in the Antonia.
Cassius posts a twenty-four-hour guard, then a double guard. He orders the door to be locked and manned for forty days. The severed hands and feet must be kept in sight at all times.
As the body rots, and begins to stink, this is quickly the least popular job in the garrison. Cassius assigns it as punishment for any common soldier who flags in the search for Jesus.
There is no evidence that Lazarus was killed after the resurrection of Jesus, though as an act of retribution it makes perfect sense. Cassius may, in any case, have by now forfeited the authority to make such a decision. He has recently botched the execution of a dissident religious leader. Even before that he’d underestimated the influence and power of Jesus.
He is a speculatore who has failed to identify and prevent trouble. The consuls in Rome will take charge from here on in, using more traditional methods.
The Russian writer Leonid Andreyev and the American Eugene O’Neill both have Lazarus deported to Rome, and neither foresees a happy outcome.
O’Neill’s Lazarus, at first, stays relentlessly optimistic—‘There is only life’—but he fails to convince the emperor, who knows of one sure way to test this thesis. ‘I am killing God,’ he says. ‘I am Death.’
In Andreyev’s short story Lazarus (1925), Lazarus discomforts the sceptical Romans. The immensity of the ‘unknowable Yonder’ is visible in his eyes, and the governing class of Rome is unable to turn away. Lazarus’s cold stare induces a profound indifference to life. He has seen the infinite, and he makes the effort of empire, with its endless strategies and setbacks, suddenly seem futile.
The emperor, who is himself a god, cannot allow this apathy to take a permanent hold in Rome. He summons Lazarus, and by force of will he defies the ‘horror of the Infinite’ that Lazarus brings to mind. The emperor prefers life as it is, with its limited vistas and occasional fleeting pleasures. The next day a Roman hangman with a red-hot iron burns out Lazarus’s eyes.
Compare this to the afterlife story of Jesus. After forty days, as documented in the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus ascends with glory into heaven. Lazarus has shown him the prospects for a re
surrected man on earth. He will have to serve a speculatore, or be blinded by the Empire, or live in fear of assassins.
The fate of the resurrected is uninterrupted misery, with no reason to smile for thirty years to come.
The disciples recognise the ascension of Jesus as an elegant solution to this problem. Back in Jerusalem, the problem unresolved is better known as Lazarus. For the disciples, Lazarus is god’s headache.
They decide to erase him from the record. He appears in none of the gospels written while the majority of the disciples are alive. Nor does he feature in the letters of Paul, who is equally sensitive to the inconvenient fact of Lazarus.
Jesus himself had predicted they would have to act: ‘If anyone says to you at that time, “Look! Here is the Messiah! Or Look! There he is!”—do not believe it. False Messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect’ (Mark 13:21–22).
There is only one true messiah. Jesus is the son of god and he ascends into heaven. Lazarus stays behind. He increasingly resembles a fake, a trick, an ordinary man. He must be shifted aside. None of his words will be remembered, and if the disciples have their way then like the son of the widow of Nain even his name will be lost. The disciples influence Mark and Matthew and Luke—no one will touch the incredible story of Lazarus. It gives off an objectionable smell.
Besides, Lazarus can be difficult. He knows more than he should, and not just the Nazareth fact that Jesus casts a shadow. The story of Jesus is finding a durable shape. Surprise revelations from his childhood, or from their friendship, are unlikely to be welcomed with joy.
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Lazarus, however, is not so easy to finish off. He refuses to be first of the martyrs, his life ruined by Jesus, and knowing what we do about the rest of his days, this never appears to be what Jesus intended.
The story of Lazarus will not stay buried. That’s a pattern with Lazarus, and it is no coincidence that John, the only gospel in which Lazarus features, is the last to be written (85–100 CE). By this time the other disciples are dead. John can’t quite remember why they wanted Lazarus suppressed, and his story is faithfully revived.
Over the centuries, this process has continued, with information about Lazarus resurfacing at regular intervals. In the oral tradition of the Middle Ages, as preserved by Jacobus de Voragine in The Golden Legend (1260), Lazarus and his sisters are ‘thrown by infidels into a ship without a rudder and launched into the deep, in the hope that in this way they would all be drowned at once’.
The infidels could be Pharisees, or possibly Romans. The powers that be are reluctant to keep the conundrum of Lazarus in sight, and they reach the same conclusion as the disciples: no one wants this story told. Lazarus is pushed out to sea along with the primary witnesses, Mary and Martha.
Reading between the lines, it becomes clear that after the ascension of Jesus, Lazarus lacks direction. He has no rudder, no means of steering the boat, and de Voragine adds that they are also ‘without sails or food’. They do have Mary, with faith enough for three, and she trusts that Jesus is watching. He will not allow Lazarus to perish at sea, by water, not after the fate he sent for Amos.
The ship lands safely on the far side of the Mediterranean, on the coast of southern France. Lazarus has a series of adventures involving the gift of fertility, typically a consolation of the gods, and perhaps a coded affirmation that Lydia has travelled with him. According to Catholic legend, Lazarus saves several mothers and children, before settling in the region as the inaugural Bishop of Marseilles.
Alternatively, he is buried in the town of Larnaca on the island of Cyprus. This is more likely, as the southeast coast of Cyprus is closer to Israel than Marseilles, and the rudderless ship may have drifted towards land on the island’s volcanic currents.
In 890 CE a tomb was discovered with the inscription Lazarus, Bishop of Larnaca. Four days dead. Friend of Jesus. Ever since, the succeeding Larnacan bishops have kept the bones of Lazarus safe beneath their magnificent Agios Lazaros Orthodox Church. The Lazarus icon in the church is beardless, incidentally, though his cropped hair is turning grey.
Wherever Lazarus goes, he never escapes his friendship with Jesus, but there is no suggestion in any of the records that Jesus ever appears to him. Lazarus is like everybody else—he simply has to believe.
In Cyprus he settles with his sisters and Lydia in a house fronting the sea. At night, the foreign smell of thyme from the inland bushes can wake him, and he sits up until sunrise for the view across the ocean to Palestine.
Lazarus occasionally receives visitors from Judaea. At first they ask what is beyond, but as time goes by they travel from greater distances and show more of an interest in Jesus.
‘What was he like?’
Lazarus describes Jesus on the shore, watching Amos drown. The pilgrims want Jesus on the cross.
‘There was no cross,’ Lazarus corrects them. ‘He died nailed to an olive tree.’
They prefer the cross, and Lazarus is old and forgetful. Christians everywhere can picture the Roman cross. It is a shared image that unites the oppressed across the empire.
‘Tell us about the sign above his head.’
‘There was no sign.’
On the island of Cyprus, in the town of Larnaca, the local tradition has a story about Lazarus smiling. He lives here for thirty years, until one day in the market he sees an urchin stealing a pot. He reputedly says: ‘the clay steals the clay’, and he smiles.
The nature of this smile is not known.
In other Larnaca traditions Lazarus works miracles, including transforming a vineyard into a salt lake. What is certain, because it is preserved in the architecture of the island even today, is that the episcopal thrones in every church of the town bear the icon of St Lazarus, and none of them the image of Jesus.
The early Jesus Christians failed to erase Lazarus from their Church. In addition to the Gospel of John, and the architectural remains on the island of Cyprus, and the persistent imaginative revivals, Lazarus is embedded in the Christian liturgy.
The followers of Jesus repeatedly insist that Jesus is the son of god.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God.
Centuries of theological exposition have misunderstood the emphasis in this memorable line of the creed. Clearly, no one doubted the arrival of a messiah, and in the Gloria there is the same insistence on identity, on who and not what: For you alone are the holy One, you alone are the lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ.
Lazarus haunts the insistent and foundational words of Christianity. Jesus is the son of god, not Lazarus. Once upon a time it was necessary to insist that this was so. Think back to the pictures, and the images that survive of onlookers bowing down to Lazarus.
The story of Lazarus resists the pressure of the early Church, and miraculously Lazarus survives. He comes back to life in mosaics and sculptures, on recovered crockery and early decorative lamp covers. He is gilded on countless icons, and carved into the monuments of the necropoli of ancient Rome. All anyone has to do is look.
Lazarus is indestructible.
He may even have been happy.
The Larnaca fragment that made Lazarus smile is less convincing than another story offered by the Chinese mystic Wei Wu Wei, in The Tenth Man (1966). Wei claims to know the joke sent by god to make Lazarus laugh.
Ten theology students are travelling from one Master to another. They cross a river in spate, but are separated by the strength of the current. When they reassemble on the other side, the students count each other to check everyone has made it safely across. Each holy man counts nine other students of theology. Alas, they bewail their poor drowned brother.
A passing traveller asks them why they’re weeping. He counts the students and assures them that all ten are alive and well. The students count again, and call the stranger a fool. They refuse to be consoled.
In his anguish, one of the trainee theologians goes to the rive
rside to wash his grief-stained face. He leans over a clear pool and calls out that he has found their brother, drowned at the bottom of the river. Each man in turn tearfully looks down into the water.
They all see him, but he is too deep to reach, so they conduct his funeral at the place on the riverbank nearest the body.
The traveller returns in the other direction. The students amuse him, so he asks them what they’re doing now. He bursts out laughing, then tells them they’ve celebrated their own deaths as well as the deaths of all the others. This means all ten of them must be truly dead, deader than anyone who ever lived, dead twice over.
‘On learning this each student was instantly awakened, and ten fully enlightened holy men returned to their monastery to the intense delight of their grandmotherly old Master’ (The Tenth Man).
Lazarus too must have made significant spiritual progress, if by now he can laugh at a drowning.
Belief is the problem. Some people refuse to believe anything unless they see it with their own eyes, like the students of theology at the river. Even then, what they see may not be true.
Jesus predicted it would be like this, in the parable that mentioned Lazarus by name—‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead’ (Luke 16:31). There is only so much a god can do.
The disbelievers have endless reserves of ingenuity: a parable by Jesus about a man named Lazarus is unconnected with Lazarus his friend. No one saw Jesus emerge from the tomb, and therefore it never happened. No one saw Lazarus die.
After Lazarus, the spectacular miracles come to an end. Smaller miracles are not infrequent, even today, and people notice but often say nothing. These less flagrant signs and wonders are easier to accommodate. They leave no distasteful smell.
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