Lazarus
The brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany. John’s Gospel reports that Jesus called him out of the tomb four days after his death, and that the chief priests then planned to kill him as well.
Lazarus appears only in the Gospel of John. He lived at Bethany with his sisters Martha and Mary of Bethany, and John says that Jesus loved the three of them (John 11:1, 5). John tells that he fell ill and died, and that Jesus, arriving when he had been four days in the tomb, called him out of it (John 11:17, 38–44); see the Raising of Lazarus. Six days before the Passover he sat at table with Jesus at Bethany. Many came to see him, and the chief priests planned to put him to death too, because people believed in Jesus on his account (John 12:1–2, 9–11). The New Testament says nothing more of him.
He is a different figure from the beggar Lazarus in one of Jesus’s parables (Luke 16:20). By the 380s the pilgrim Egeria knew Bethany as “the Lazarium”, where the Christians of Jerusalem gathered on the day before Palm Sunday (Egeria, Itinerary 29.3–5).
In the timeline
- AD 30 or 33, estimated dateThe Raising of Lazarus
John reports that Jesus called his friend Lazarus out of the tomb at Bethany four days after his death. Many believed, and the council in Jerusalem, on the advice of the high priest Caiaphas, resolved that Jesus must die.