In John's Gospel, raising Lazarus is what sets Jesus's crucifixion in motion
Jesus hears his friend Lazarus is gravely ill and deliberately waits two days before setting off. By the time he reaches Bethany, Lazarus has been entombed for four days. The miracle that follows is John's climactic sign, and it prompts the priests to plot against Jesus and even consider killing Lazarus too.
The story occupies chapter 11 of the Gospel of John and is its longest continuous narrative outside the Passion. Lazarus lives in Bethany near Jerusalem with his sisters Mary and Martha. Each sister greets Jesus with the same reproach, that her brother would have lived had he come sooner. Jesus answers Martha with 'I am the resurrection and the life', and on meeting Mary the narrator records the shortest verse of all: 'Jesus wept.' At the tomb Martha warns of the smell, the stone is rolled back, and Lazarus walks out still bound in grave-cloths.
In John's structure the raising is the last miracle before the Passion. It explains the crowds that greet Jesus on Palm Sunday and leads straight to the decision by Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin to put him on trial; theologians Moloney and Harrington call it a resurrection that will lead to death. A strikingly similar story, with the young man unnamed, appears in the contested Secret Gospel of Mark, and some scholars think it preserves an older version.
The name is the Greek form of Eleazar, 'God has helped', which led Bede to remark that no one Jesus raised was helped more, having lain dead four days. Interpreters have debated details for centuries: the French Protestant Jakob Abbadie argued the delay ensured nobody could claim Lazarus had not really died, and some commentators saw a second miracle in a man walking with bound feet, a point others disputed. The Catholic Catechism stresses he returned to ordinary life and would die again.
Scholars such as Mark Goodacre suggest the evangelist reworked earlier traditions from the other Gospels, including a parable in Luke about a different Lazarus. The name has since entered science, where a 'Lazarus taxon' is a species that reappears in the fossil record after apparent extinction.
Source: Lazarus of Bethany
