Who was Lazarus in the Bible?

A family in Bethany

John introduces him through his sisters: “Lazarus from Bethany, of the village of Mary and her sister, Martha” (John 11:1). Bethany lay “about fifteen stadia” from Jerusalem, some 3 kilometers, over the Mount of Olives (11:18). Luke knows the sisters too, Martha busy serving and Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet (Luke 10:38–42), but never mentions a brother. The name Lazarus is the Greek form of Eleazar, “God has helped.” The village kept it: Bethany is today al-Eizariya, “the place of Lazarus,” in the West Bank.

Why did Jesus wait?

Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When therefore he heard that he was sick, he stayed two days in the place where he was.

That “therefore” has puzzled readers ever since. John’s own answer is that the sickness is “for the glory of God” (11:4), and that the disciples will come to believe (11:15). When Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been in the tomb four days. A rabbinic tradition held that the soul hovered near the body for three days, hoping to return, and left once the face began to change (Jerusalem Talmud, Yevamot 16:3). Many commentators read the four days in that light: no one could doubt he was dead. Martha puts it plainly at the tomb: by now there is a stench.

“Lazarus, come out!”

Both sisters greet Jesus with the same words: if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Martha adds a confession of faith and hears, “I am the resurrection and the life.” At the tomb Jesus weeps, in the shortest verse of most English Bibles: “Jesus wept” (11:35). Then he has the stone taken away and calls into the cave.

He who was dead came out, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Free him, and let him go.”

Lazarus never says a word in the Gospel. Six days before Passover he sits at the table in Bethany while Martha serves (12:2), and crowds come out to see him as much as Jesus. That makes him dangerous: the chief priests, John says, plot to kill Lazarus too (12:10–11).

Why only John tells it

Mark, Matthew and Luke never mention him. In John the raising is the last and most striking of Jesus’s signs, and the event that sets the council planning his death; in the other three, that role belongs to the protest in the Temple. Scholars explain the silence in different ways. Some think John shaped the scene from older traditions about Bethany. The historian Richard Bauckham suggests the earlier Gospels kept quiet about Lazarus to protect a man who was still alive and still a target. Orthodox churches keep the miracle on Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday.

The other Lazarus

In a parable in Luke, a rich man dressed in purple feasts every day while a beggar lies at his gate.

A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was taken to his gate, full of sores,

He is the only invented character in Jesus’s parables who is given a name. Because of his sores, medieval Europe made this Lazarus the patron of lepers: a leper became a lazar, and a quarantine station a lazaretto. Lazarus of Bethany lent his name elsewhere. A Lazarus taxon is a species that vanishes from the fossil record and turns up again, and Lazarus syndrome is a heart that restarts on its own after resuscitation has stopped. Legend gave him a second life too. Orthodox tradition makes him bishop of Kition, today’s Larnaca in Cyprus, where a church first built around 900 stands over his tomb; a medieval French legend made him bishop of Marseille.