Richard Beard - Lazarus Is Dead

‘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 resurrected 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 (85–10 °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.

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Alternatively, he is buried in the town of Larnaca on the island of Cyprus. This is more likely, as the south-east 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 89 °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.’