How does the death and resurrection of Lazarus foreshadow Christ's?

Answer 1

A:To provide a complete and honest answer to this, we need to look at the context in which the story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus was written. First, there are two parallel biblical stories of the death and resurrection of Lazarus.

In Luke's Gospel, Martha and Mary are sisters and friends of Jesus, but do not have a brother called Lazarus. Jesus tells a parable of Lazarus dying and going down to hell where he meets a rich man being punished for his sins. The rich man asks for Lazarus to be raised from the dead so that he can warn his friends of the fate that awaits them.

Only John's Gospel Gospel says that Lazarus was the brother of Jesus' very close friends, Martha and Mary. For theological reasons, the author of John wanted to make the resurrection of Lazarus the final trigger for the arrest of Jesus, instead of the cleansing of the Temple, as in the synoptic gospels. He therefore moved the Cleansing of the Temple to the beginning of his story, almost immediately after Jesus met John the Baptist. In John 12:19, the turning point is identified: "The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? behold, the world is gone after him.") This certainly provides a link between the death of Lazarus and that of Jesus.

The majority view of modern New Testament scholars is that John's Gospel was loosely based on Luke's Gospel, although with some material taken direct from Mark. Thus, when we see Mary, Martha and Lazarus only in the two gospels and in quite parallel but different stories, we can understand that the author of John's Gospel was inspired by the parable in Luke's Gospel but chose to change it from a parable to the most important miracle in the entire mission of Jesus. We can also understand that Lazarus, as described in John's Gospel, was no more a real person than the Lazarus of Luke's parable.

Perhaps we can say that any story of death and resurrection foreshadow the death and resurrection of Jesus. But there are important differences. Lazarus died of an illness, whereas Jesus was crucified. Lazarus was dead for more than three days, an important milestone, as the ancients believed that the soul finally leaves the body at the end of three days, making a subsequent resurrection a most exceptional miracle. Jesus is reported to have been dead from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning - about one and a half days. The tomb of Lazarus was opened for Jesus when he asked to be allowed in; the tomb of Jesus was opened in mysterious circumstances which vary from gospel to gospel.