Richard Beard - Lazarus Is Dead

If anything, he feels blessed. Jerusalem is a city of eighty thousand souls, and the traffic in slaves and soldiers brings in every latest disease. Within living memory (as reported by the Jewish historian Josephus) an epidemic has decimated the city, probably smallpox. This among other invisible demons is always creeping from house to house, and every illness is lethal. And also not lethal. Some people are struck down and die, and some are struck down and do not.

Lazarus, so far, has remained untouched — even god, it seems, approves of Lydia.

He sinks his head underwater, and hears his beating heart loud in a pulse behind his ear. By following religious procedures he is giving god a chance to make him well. He is a reasonable man.

He lets his face up for air, scratches an itch on the outside of his ankle — not the scabies but a mosquito bite. He takes the skin off the top. Sinks again, waits, rises up, breathes. His nails are too long. He picks off a fingernail and flicks it away into the slowly moving water.

Overhead, on the greenish roof of the cave, moisture gathers in blisters. One of these fills out, elongates, detaches and aims with focused intention directly at the centre of Lazarus’s forehead. He blinks at the last moment and it hits him below the eye.

5

Leviticus works. If it didn’t, the rules would never have been written down.

By the end of a seven-day quarantine his scabies rash is fading. His groin sometimes itches, and his head can hurt, and he hasn’t sold a sheep in a week, but Lazarus feels sufficiently recovered to attempt the walk into Jerusalem. He has a question to ask Isaiah about the betrothal ceremony, now only a month away. He wants to know if Isaiah will pay for the wine.

At the tombs Faruq is dismantling a sheep-pen. Lazarus greets him and the two men squat on their heels. They face each other silently, and this is business so neither rushes to speak.

‘Faruq, are you my friend?’

‘Everyone is your friend.’

Lazarus leans his weight forward, elbows on knees. His fingers brush the fading rash along his inner arm.

‘My cousin knows a healer,’ Faruq says. ‘At Jericho.’

‘I’m fine. The worst is over.’

Lazarus glances at the pens. Faruq has sold half his midsummer stock, but not to Lazarus. Like everyone, Faruq needs to live — friendship can only go so far.

‘I’ll negotiate higher prices,’ Lazarus says. ‘I haven’t been well.’

Faruq’s eyes are orange like those of his sheep, his face the colour of hardwood scratched and polished by every outdoor season. He nods his head. He watches Lazarus stand up, turn, walk past the tombs and round the corner. Slower than he used to be. Faruq detaches a rail from a fence.

We’ve established that Lazarus’s illness is so familiar that the bible doesn’t need to describe it. Also that Lazarus falls sick at the exact moment the water at the wedding in Cana becomes wine. None of the diseases common in the region at the time, however, fit the one-year interval between infection and death.

The incubation periods don’t add up, and in this area the story of Lazarus needs some attention to make it credible. Even outside the story, beyond time, with the benefit of hindsight and foresight, it can be difficult to fit every factor together.

It is therefore worth searching out more detailed evidence of the disease that plays its part and will eventually kill him.

‘Nearly all his life he suffered from a weak heart, then he was cured, as everyone in Bethany could testify, and now he was dead.’ José Saramago claims that Lazarus had chronic heart trouble, and died peacefully in his sleep.

Equally absurdly, the Czech writer Karel Čapek ( Lazarus , 1949) thinks Lazarus died of a chill — ‘it was the cold wind that got me, that time when — when I was so ill …’

Not so. The story demands that Lazarus suffer. The more hideous his death the more impressive his revival. When the time comes, Jesus needs everyone to believe that Lazarus has truly come back to life. But they first need to believe, without reservation, that he died.

The most effective way to publicise his death in advance is to make his physical decline visible. His sickness should be horrific, definitive, undeniable. It should be both recognisable and worse than anything anyone has ever seen.

Yes, this is how it was done. Lazarus did not die from one of the seven prevalent illnesses of ancient Israel. Not enough. He has to contract them all.

In a small cell low in the Antonia Fortress, Cassius is questioning a young man stopped by a routine patrol at the Damascus Gate. He was leaving Jerusalem with a message for Jesus from the house of Lazarus.

Lazarus is too clever to have sent the message himself. It is an appeal from his sister Mary asking Jesus to pray for his sometime childhood friend, who is ill. He has been ill for months and is not getting better.

With a little Roman encouragement, the messenger is persuaded to continue on his way to Sidon without stopping off in the Galilee.

‘We will know,’ Cassius warns him. ‘We will be watching. There is nothing we Romans don’t see.’

Cassius, like any ambitious speculatore , tries to identify a pattern. Lazarus is either ill or pretending to be ill. He is in contact with his friend Jesus, who has a talent for drawing crowds. This is a situation with potential, because for some time Cassius has been developing an idea to impress the consuls in Rome. He’s searching for a Roman client messiah.

Romans everywhere make life better for foreigners who have yet to become Romans. In Palestine it will be no different, and the secret to this corner of the empire is hatred. The rich hate the poor and the poor hate the rich. Cassius has studied their scriptures. The smooth men hate the hairy men. The Judaeans hate the Galileans who hate the Samaritans, and everybody hates the Idumeans. Periodically, they come to hate how much they hate each other, making them hungry for a messiah who can teach them how to love.

Their hope is their weakness. Rome allows them self-government, as long as Rome can select their king. Now Cassius wants to take this imperial principle one step further. A messiah is the future that Judaeans expect and a messiah, like a king, can be compatible with the Roman project. As long as Rome decides who that messiah shall be.

Standard pathology, on this occasion, will not apply. Remember that Lazarus is fated to come back from the dead. If there is divine intervention on the frontier between life and death, then natural law can equally be suspended elsewhere. Lazarus can have all seven diseases at the same time, but the progress of each will depend on his special circumstances.

Return again to the sources.

There is a thriving folk memory of a sick and diseased Lazarus, usually attributed to the moment he reappears from his tomb. He has a greenish tinge to his head, among other gruesome details. Sholem Asch remembers ‘a skeleton…the skull was covered with a sort of skin, but the colour of it was neither human nor animal: ashen, bluish and lifeless…the naked, bony throat and neck’.

The parchment skin, a strange-coloured head, recessed staring eyes — over the years this description of the living Lazarus has migrated (as in Asch) to the time after his death. It is as if the resurrected Lazarus were only half alive, half brought back. The horror is vividly remembered, but incorrectly placed. The recollection of an agonised Lazarus comes not from after his resurrection, as Asch mistakenly assumes, but before.

‘We saw two yellow arms,’ Nikos Kazantzakis writes in The Last Temptation (1961), ‘cracked and full of dirt; finally the skeleton-like body.’

Before, not after. Lazarus in the last months of his life will become quite a sight. His ruined body will become a public curiosity, his illness a combination of the harshest symptoms of the worst illnesses sent to try the Israelites.