Miracles

The Raising of Lazarus

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "The Raising of Lazarus." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/miracles/the-raising-of-lazarus.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). The Raising of Lazarus. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/miracles/the-raising-of-lazarus

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-the-raising-of-lazarus,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {The Raising of Lazarus},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/miracles/the-raising-of-lazarus},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The Gospel of John reports that Jesus raised Lazarus of Bethany from the dead four days after his burial, at the request of Lazarus's sisters Martha and Mary, presenting it as the last and greatest of his public signs. Distinct from the religious event of the same name, this entry carries the miracle claim and the scholarly debate over a story found only in John and absent from the Synoptic Gospels despite its dramatic weight.

Facts

Disputed

Skeptical Explanation

The story's total absence from Matthew, Mark and Luke, despite its scale and its role in provoking the crucifixion, has led Rudolf Bultmann and later critics to read it as a Johannine composition. 2

The Raising of Lazarus appears only in John's Gospel; none of the three Synoptic Gospels mentions it, despite its dramatic character and its placement in John as the climactic sign leading directly to the plot against Jesus's life. Raymond E. Brown's The Gospel According to John I-XII (Anchor Bible, vol. 29, 1966) addresses this Synoptic silence directly in his commentary on the passage. The method is argument from silence, weighed against what is independently known about each Gospel's selection principles, since an author's silence can indicate either that an event did not happen or that the author chose not to include it. Bultmann's school reads John's uncorroborated report and the Synoptics' silence together as evidence against an independent historical tradition; other scholars read the Synoptics as demonstrably selective on other material too, and count their silence on Lazarus as inconclusive. Brown's commentary records the disagreement without resolving it.

Investigation

Investigation Verdict

Raymond Brown's Anchor Bible commentary places the Lazarus story as the seventh and climactic sign in John's Book of Signs, structurally paired with Jesus's declaration, "I am the resurrection and the life." 2

The Claim

The Gospel of John reports that Jesus raised Lazarus of Bethany from the dead four days after his burial, at the request of his sisters Martha and Mary, presented as the last and greatest of Jesus's public signs. 1Christianity

Learn More

The Text

John 11 tells of Lazarus of Bethany, a village near Jerusalem, falling ill and dying while Jesus delayed his arrival. By the time Jesus reaches the tomb, Lazarus has been dead four days, a detail John underlines because contemporary Jewish belief held that the soul lingered near the body for three days before departing for good, ruling out any suggestion that Lazarus had merely been resuscitated from a death not yet complete. Jesus tells Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life," before calling Lazarus out of the tomb, still bound in his burial cloths.

John presents this as the seventh and climactic sign in the sequence that structures the first half of his gospel, and ties it directly to the plot against Jesus: the chief priests and Pharisees, John says, decided from that point that Jesus had to be put to death, since so public an act was drawing too many people to believe in him. In John's narrative, the raising of Lazarus is the immediate cause of the events that lead to the crucifixion. Bethany's location, under two miles from Jerusalem, put the episode within easy reach of the temple authorities in a way Jesus's Galilean miracles were not, which is part of why John gives it such weight in his narrative: an event witnessed that close to the city could not be ignored by those already wary of Jesus's following.

A Story the Synoptics Do Not Tell

Matthew, Mark and Luke never mention Lazarus of Bethany or his raising, a silence scholars find harder to explain away here than with Cana, given the story's scale, its setting near Jerusalem and the causal role John gives it in provoking the crucifixion. Raymond Brown's Anchor Bible commentary treats the episode as John's climactic sign, deliberately built to embody Jesus's "I am the resurrection and the life" discourse, and situates it within John's broader tendency to compose narrative around theological statements.

Rudolf Bultmann and later historical critics working in that tradition read the Synoptics' total silence as evidence that the story is a Johannine theological composition rather than an independently remembered event, since a miracle of this magnitude, so close to Jerusalem and so consequential to the plot against Jesus, would be a strange thing for Mark, generally considered the earliest gospel, to omit if it had reached him. Other scholars argue the Synoptics' silence reflects their own selective sources and Galilee-centered focus rather than counting as evidence against the story, since all three gospels are compressed accounts that leave out a great deal. The disagreement between these readings has not been resolved, and probably cannot be from the text alone.

Cross-Tradition Connections