An intriguing image frequently appears on the walls of ancient Christian catacombs and on carved reliefs of early Christian tombs—a mummy-like creature emerging from a small booth. Nearby, a man holding a wand taps or points at the mummy. The scene is stunning, even slightly horrifying. The door of the tomb is open. The mummy walks. The magician’s wand points.
Viewers familiar with the Gospel of John immediately recognize this as the moment when Jesus commands the dead man to rise and exit his tomb, crying, “Lazarus, come out!” Yet in many ways—the booth, the mummy wrappings, the magician’s wand—it differs from the account in the Gospel of John (11:1–45), incidentally the only canonical gospel in which the raising of Lazarus is recounted.
Illustrations provide one way among many that the story of Lazarus can be understood. Some art reflects the gospel account itself; other art deals with issues that developed in the early Church and reveals how Christians thought about Jesus’ magical powers, about his resurrection and about whether flesh as well as spirit could be restored to life.
In the biblical text Lazarus, described as the one whom “Jesus loved,” falls ill. His two sisters Martha and Mary1 appeal for help to Jesus, who is some distance away, east of the Jordan. (Mary, not to be confused with the mother of Jesus, is identified as “the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair” [John 11:2]). Jesus delays for more than two days in responding to the sisters’ plea; finally he sets out for Bethany. Martha intercepts Jesus on the way. Jesus assures her, “Your brother will rise again,” to which Martha answers: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus responds to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:23–26).
When Jesus arrives in Bethany he finds Lazarus dead and in his tomb. Jesus goes to the tomb—a cave with a stone blocking the opening—and orders: “Take away the stone.” Whereupon Martha advises: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days” (John 11:39). Nevertheless, Jesus commands: “Lazarus, come out!”
To the amazement of the onlooking sisters, disciples and other gathered witnesses, Lazarus emerges from the cave, “his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth” (John 11:44). Some of the witnesses to the miracle become followers of Jesus; others report the event to the Pharisees, who are fearful that the Romans will destroy all the Jews if belief in Jesus’ miracles becomes widespread. The high priest Caiaphas decides “that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed……From that day on they planned to put him to death” (John 11:50–53).
As a literary creation, the Lazarus story forms the longest continuous narrative in John’s Gospel apart from the account of the Passion. It takes up nearly all of chapter 11. The author skillfully employs irony as well as suspense; the action is delayed; the main characters are in danger. The characters also have distinct personalities and reveal themselves in dialogue: The sisters beg Jesus to come to their brother’s bedside and then bristle angrily at his delay; the disciples worry for Jesus’ safety and bravely stick by him; Jews comfort the sisters and witness the miracle; informers provoke the Pharisees to set in motion the plot to execute Jesus.2
Theologically, the Lazarus story contains several themes—faltering faith contrasted to steadfast trust, conversion versus betrayal of the wonder-working divine, shattering grief followed by triumphant joy and, finally, life’s victory over the grave.
Most basically, the narrative underscores Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead.3 Lazarus is the first, symbolically, to experience this resurrection, even if it is only temporal and not eternal. The story assures Christians that death is not ultimate, but merely a passage to a new life.
Lazarus’s resurrection is the climax of Jesus’ public ministry. After this unsurpassed spectacle of a 022steadily building ministry of healings, miracles and teaching, John’s narrative radically shifts direction to the unfolding of the Passion drama. Lazarus’s resurrection occupies a climactic position in John’s Gospel, connecting the Miracles and the Passion, and prefiguring Jesus’ own death, burial and resurrection. It functions as a kind of metaphorical “summing up,” and moves the gospel out of what Raymond Brown calls the “book of signs” into the “book of glory.”4
The story of Lazarus foreshadows the Easter narrative in small details as well as in broad outline—in both we have the stone rolling away from the door of the tomb, the cast-off linen wrappings and the weeping women. The chief priest Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die “for the nation”—that is, to avoid the nation’s destruction by the Romans, but Caiaphas’s prophecy went further: “Jesus was about to die,” he prophesied, “for the nation and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God” (John 11:49–52). Caiaphas’s prophecy almost serves to announce the coming events of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.
The raising of Lazarus provides the culminating “sign” or proof of Jesus’ authority and power.5 It symbolizes triumph over death and establishes Jesus as the Son of God.
Although the raising of Lazarus is found only in John’s Gospel, a variant version was discovered by Morton Smith in 1958 in the so-called “Secret Gospel of Mark.” Smith, a Columbia University professor, found this text in the Mar Saba monastery in the Judean desert. It is quoted in what purports to be a letter from Clement of Alexandria (150–215 A.D.) to a certain Theodore, giving him advice about a libertine heretical group, the Carpocratians, who claimed to have a secret Gospel of Mark. Clement confirms the existence of this gospel, left by Mark himself to the church at Alexandria, and proceeds to quote from it.6
Clement’s quotations from this Secret Mark include a version of the raising of Lazarus that parallels the Johannine version in its essential details (although only one sister is mentioned), but has at least one significant difference. At the end of the story, six days after Lazarus rises from the dead, Jesus initiates Lazarus into the mystery of the Kingdom of God: “Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth [Lazarus] comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God.”7
This account tantalizingly resonates with canonical Mark’s description of a mysterious youth dressed only in a linen cloth who was with Jesus at Gethsemane, where Jesus and the twelve disciples had gone to pray on the night of Jesus’ arrest. In the skirmish at Jesus’ arrest, the youth’s linen cloth is pulled off leaving him naked (Mark 14:51–52). Both scenarios have led to some fascinating and suggestive hypotheses.8
Early Christian writers apparently did not know about the esoteric tradition of Jesus’ nocturnal initiation of Lazarus into the mystery of the Kingdom of God. At least their interpretations do not reveal that knowledge. Early Christian literature refers to the Lazarus story primarily when arguing for bodily—or fleshly—resurrection at the end time. This doctrine required defense, given the prevailing philosophical objections that immortality might be a property of the soul, but never of the perishable material element of human existence. The issue of bodily resurrection created serious divisions in the early Church and was a major battleground for centuries.
Paul clearly states that flesh and blood do not inherit the Kingdom, since what is perishable cannot inherit the imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:50). However, the early Church often confesses a belief in the resurrection of the flesh, and this is where the story of Lazarus comes into play.9
Irenaeus, a second-century bishop of Lyons, in his treatise refuting heresies,10 maintains that although the flesh decays after death and mortal bodies are distinct from incorporeal souls, at God’s command decomposing flesh can be restored in glory. The raising of Lazarus, for Irenaeus, proves that the dead can rise in their identical bodies “at the last trumpet” (1 Corinthians 15:52), when all the dead in their tombs will come forth. For Irenaeus, the wrappings that bound Lazarus’s hands and feet (see fifth-century ivory pyxis) represent the sins that bound Lazarus in life. Thus when Jesus says “unbind him and let him go,” he is both renewing Lazarus’s physical life and forgiving his sins.
023Tertullian, another second-century church Father, also presents Lazarus as the preeminent example of bodily resurrection. With little regard for his readers’ sensibilities, Tertullian describes Lazarus’s decaying flesh—beginning to stink—as a body that nevertheless could be resurrected and restored to wholeness and beauty. Clearly, Tertullian means the body, not the incorporeal soul. In an obvious reference to the incarnation of Christ, Tertullian argues that Lazarus’s flesh was no more composed of soul than his soul was combined with flesh, but that both could be and would be raised together.11
By the fourth century, writers like Augustine and Ambrose were expounding allegorical or “spiritual” meanings for the Lazarus story. Going beyond the literal meaning that dead flesh could be restored to life, Augustine argues that Lazarus’s tomb signifies his being lost in sin. The stone over the tomb’s entrance, described in John 11:38 but often omitted in artists’ renderings of the scene (see Roman sarcophagus), symbolizes the weight of guilty habits; Lazarus’s resurrection according to Augustine, represents God’s grace given to overcome sin; the bindings around his hands and feet symbolize the fallen nature of the present human condition.12 For writers like Augustine, then, the Lazarus story emphasizes God’s ability to overcome sin (that is, death) through grace (that is, rebirth, perhaps initially through baptism) given to those who believe in Jesus.
Judging by the number of surviving reproductions, the raising of Lazarus made a deeper impression on early Christian artists than almost any other New Testament pericope. Art historians have catalogued more than 55 paintings of Lazarus’s resurrection in the third-and-fourth-century Roman catacombs, and at least an equal number of carved versions on contemporaneous marble sarcophagi. Dozens of Lazarus images are known in ivory, glass and metal in non-funereal contexts. Even today, the raising of Lazarus is a favorite scene of artists.
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when images of the virgin and child or of the crucifixion far outnumbered illustrations from the life or miracles of Jesus, Lazarus was nevertheless a subject for artists such as Giotto, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Rembrandt and Rubens.
The artists’ interpretations of the story are as varied as the verbal interpretations. Some stick close to a literal representation of John’s text. Others depart from it.
024The earliest depictions had a consistent, almost static composition. Jesus stands gesturing toward the tomb with a wand; the cave-tomb commonly appears as a small booth, typical of a Roman aedicula, used for above-ground inhumations. The booth often appeared with gabled roof, columns and even steps leading to the door; Lazarus emerges in a tunic or as a mummy wrapped in strips of burial linen; sometimes Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, are present.
The earliest known illustration of the raising of Lazarus dates to the mid-200s. It was painted on a wall in the Catacomb of Callixtus in Rome (see Lazarus image). It shows only two figures—Jesus and the nude Lazarus. Lazarus stands with legs slightly apart in front of a small brick building with a decorated gable, meant to be his tomb. Jesus, facing the viewer, wears a long-sleeved tunic and pallium (an off-the-shoulder cloak) and gestures toward Lazarus with his right hand. His left hand grasps a long narrow wand.
Slightly later frescoes, including one found in the Roman catacomb of Peter and Marcellinus (dating perhaps to the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century), portray the tomb in three dimensions, with more decorations and a short flight of stairs approaching the door. Lazarus appears as a small, wrapped mummy, face covered, while Jesus wears an elaborate tunic with stripes, holding the wand in his raised right hand ready to tap Lazarus’s head.
In Graydon Snyder’s survey of Christian imagery before the fourth century, he categorizes the resurrection of Lazarus as sepulchral art. It portrays the hope for the resurrection of the dead buried in the catacombs: “Surely we must believe that, above all, Jesus delivers from death. That must account for the popularity of the scene in catacomb art.”13
025The frequent placement of the Lazarus scene with representations of other biblical texts provides additional insight into the subtle meanings of this potent image. A late third-century sarcophagus in the Vatican Museum, known as the “Jonah sarcophagus” after its main scene and featured character, is the earliest sarcophagus relief of the raising of Lazarus (see Roman sarcophagus). On the sarcophagus, Lazarus is tucked away on one corner above Jonah’s ship and an open-mouthed sea creature is swallowing the hapless Jonah. Like Lazarus, Jonah might be interpreted as a prefiguration of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Matthew 12:39–40 (parallel Luke 11:29–32) compares Jonah’s “three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster” with Jesus’ three days and nights “in the heart of the earth.” In this depiction, a pair of apostles and the two sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, witness Lazarus’s emergence from his tomb. Most probably it is Mary who kneels at Jesus’ feet, just as she knelt when she met Jesus on his way to Lazarus on the road to Bethany (John 11:32). The kneeling Mary reminds us of the prior conversations of Jesus, Martha and Mary on the road, when Jesus tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25–26). Thus the artist conflates two moments in the narrative—the meeting on the road and the event of Lazarus’s resurrection.
By the mid-fourth century the image of Lazarus was often squeezed on the edge of a frieze jammed with a variety of scenes, including the arrest of Peter (Acts 12:3–4), the miracle of the loaves and fishes (Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:30–44; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–13), Daniel in the den of lions (Daniel 6:17–24) and the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11). The condensed image is frequently reduced to three figures, Jesus, Martha and Lazarus, although it may have one shadowy witness looking over Jesus’ shoulder. Both tomb and mummy are smaller and greatly simplified. Jesus is dressed in a tunic with his pallium slung over his left arm. In his left hand Jesus holds a scroll; his right hand holds a wand with which he touches the mummy’s head. The scroll and tunic identify Jesus as a philosopher.
A variation of this composition is featured in a pair of fourth-century frescoes from the Via Latina Catacomb, cubicula C and O (see Lazarus painting). Jesus stands before a crowd of people and points with his wand at a small booth-like structure. In one of the pair of frescoes (cubiculum C), the booth, or tomb, is empty. Above both frescoes appear two smaller images: On the left, Moses receives the law (in cubiculum C, from a cloud; in cubiculum O, from a hand reaching out of the sky); on the right is the column of fire that guided the Israelites at night through the wilderness during the Exodus from Egypt (Exodus 13:21). No sisters kneel at Jesus’ feet in either representation.14
Two beautiful examples of non-funereal occurrences of the raising of Lazarus occur on the fifth-century, north Italian ivory diptych called the “Andrews” diptych after its owner and donor F. E. Andrews (see ivory diptych) and among the mosaic scenes in the sixth-century church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (see miracle scene detail). Both of these representations appear within cycles of images of Jesus’ healings and miracles.
The Andrews diptych cycle shows Lazarus on its front panel with Jesus, Mary and one onlooker and beneath it the miracle at Cana and the healing of the leper (Matthew 8:1–4; Mark 1:40–44; Luke 5:12–14). On the rear panel we find the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the healing of the man born blind (Mark 10:46–52; Matthew 20:29–34; Luke 18:35–43) and the healing of the paralytic (Matthew 9:1–8; Mark 2:1–12; Luke 5:17–26).
The mosaic in Ravenna’s Sant’Apollinare Nuovo omits Martha and Mary and shows only one white-robed witness standing by. Lazarus stands inside his open tomb door, bound in his grave wrappings.
Jesus holds a wand in many of these depictions, yet it is not mentioned as one of Jesus’ props in scripture. A wand also appears in depictions of other miracle stories: the transformation of the water to wine at Cana, the raising of the son of the widow of Nain (Mark 5:21–24, 35–43; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:1–44) and the miraculous feeding of the crowd with loaves and fishes. The wand symbolizes Jesus’ miraculous powers, a thaumaturgical attribute, not simply a sign of authority. In contrast, in compositions that portray Jesus’ authority, he is shown holding a scroll.15
026The wand as a magical attribute raises the possibility (perhaps at the popular level anyway) that the early Church understood Jesus as a magician, as well as a divine savior and teacher. In early Christian art we would expect to see scenes from Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection. But they are absent. Instead we find preoccupation with Jesus’ supernatural acts. As Thomas Mathews puts it in hisrecent book, “Over and over Christ appears raising the dead, casting out demons, giving sight to the blind, curing women of arthritis or menstrual disorders, changing water to wine or multiplying loaves to feed the thousands. The insistent repetition of these images implies that people identified Christ most often as a miracle-man.”16
As early as the third century, we find a dispute about Jesus’ magical powers. The church father Origen refuted his critic Celsus’s accusation that Jesus was a mere trickster. Origen claimed that Jesus’ miraculous healings, feedings and other wonders were simply by-products of his efforts to gain the attention of those needing to reform their characters and to convert to the virtuous life. According to Origen, Jesus’ “signs” (as described by the Gospel of John) were only a means to a much more important end, the initial acknowledgement of Jesus as Son of God, followed by a commitment to follow him.17
Identifying Jesus as a miracle worker makes many Christians uncomfortable, perhaps because we have a problem with the term “magician” and with miracles in general.a Those who have difficulty with Jesus’ wand, his miracles or his healings should recall certain stories in the Hebrew scriptures; for example, Moses uses his rod to bring forth water from a rock 027and Elisha restores the son of the Shunammite woman to lifeb just as Jesus did with Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain. As John Dominic Crossan wrote in his recent study of the historical Jesus: “It is endlessly fascinating to watch Christian theologians describe Jesus as miracle worker rather than magician and then attempt to define the difference between those two. There is, it would seem from the tendentiousness of such arguments, an ideological need to protect religion and its miracles from magic and its effects.”18
By acknowledging the magical element in the raising of Lazarus, artists affirm more than a belief in the resurrection of the dead. They also affirm Jesus as a source of saving power.19
In early Christian art, portrayals of the crucifixion and the resurrection are absent, but may be symbolized by other biblical images. Artists remind us of the crucifixion when they depict Abraham offering Isaac.c Similarly, portrayal of the resurrection of Lazarus evokes the resurrection of Jesus. A particularly exquisite example, one of many where the raising of Lazarus and the offering of Isaac appear together, is a fifth-century ivory pyxis from Syria-Palestine (see ivory pyxis). Lazarus and Abraham appear on opposite sides of the round vessel, suggesting that the resurrection of the dead was made possible by Jesus’ own sacrifice. The four other images on the vessel are all miracles attributed to Jesus, events that in John’s Gospel occur before the culminating miracle of the raising of Lazarus. Again, as in many representations of Lazarus, Jesus holds a wand as Lazarus emerges from his tomb.
028The image of Lazarus’s resurrection is much more than an artistic way of asserting expectation of an afterlife for the dear departed buried nearby. Since Lazarus is only temporarily returned to this earth and not resurrected—at least not yet—to eternal life, the image is first of all the prototype of an anticipated future for each Christian individual. The image symbolically alludes to Jesus’ resurrection and asserts that Jesus was a savior whose magic was efficacious and persuasive.
An intriguing image frequently appears on the walls of ancient Christian catacombs and on carved reliefs of early Christian tombs—a mummy-like creature emerging from a small booth. Nearby, a man holding a wand taps or points at the mummy. The scene is stunning, even slightly horrifying. The door of the tomb is open. The mummy walks. The magician’s wand points. Viewers familiar with the Gospel of John immediately recognize this as the moment when Jesus commands the dead man to rise and exit his tomb, crying, “Lazarus, come out!” Yet in many ways—the booth, the mummy wrappings, the magician’s […]
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The names Mary, Martha and Lazarus have all been found on first-century ossuaries, in one case together on a tomb near Bethany. See Jack Finegan, The Archeology of the New Testament (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 360–61 (entry 312). Tradition makes Lazarus out to have been the first Bishop of Marseilles, and martyred under Domition (81–96). His feast day is December 17.
2.
Articles and commentaries that specifically examine the Johannine Lazarus narrative include Brendan Byrne, Lazarus: A Contemporary Reading of John 11:1–46 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991); Gérard Rochais, Les récits de résurrection des morts dans le Nouveau Testament (Cambridge: University Press, 1981); Sandra M. Schneiders, “Death in the Community of Eternal Life: History, Theology, and Spirituality in John 11, ” Interpretation 41 (January, 1987), pp. 44–56; and W. Wilkens, “Die Erweckung des Lazarus,” Theologische Zeitschrift 15 (1959), pp. 22–39.
For thorough literary analyses of the Lazarus narrative, see R.A. Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993); and J. Kremer, Lazarus: Die Geschichte einer Auferstehung: Text: Wirkungsgeschichte und Botschaft (Stuttgart: Katholik Bibelwerk, 1985).
3.
This interpretation of John’s purpose is exemplified by James P. Martin, “History and Eschatology in the Lazarus Narrative,” Scottish Journal of Theology 17 (1964), pp. 332–343; it is also the conclusion of Sandra Schneider’s “Death in the Community,” Interpretation 41.1 (January 1987).
4.
These terms are borrowed from Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John, vol.1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1996–1970) , p.429.
5.
See the discussion in Howard Clark Kee, Medicine, Miracle and Magic in New Testament Times (Cambridge: University Press, 1986), pp. 86–94 especially.
6.
The authenticity of this letter, discovered by Morton Smith, cannot be absolutely verified, and scholars who accept it nevertheless disagree about the dating of the “Secret Gosple of Mark,” its transmission and its role in the Alexandrian church. See the critical edition of the manuscript published by Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973); as well as a version for the general public: The Secret Gospel (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). A summary of scholarly opinion regarding the letter by John Dominic Crossan, Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon (Seabury Press: Minneapolis, 1985), pp. 89–121: and Saul Levin, “The Early History of Christianity, in Light of the ‘Secret Gospel’ of Mark,” Aufstieg und Niedergang des romischen Welt 2.25.6 (1988), pp. 4272–4275.
7.
Trans. Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria, p. 447. This version of Lazarus’s raising may also explain a somewhat mysterious tradition of the ancient Egyptian church, which identified the sixth day of the sixth week of Lent as the day on which Jesus had baptized his apostle and Saint Mark had baptized his converts in Alexandria. Thomas Talley and other scholars have theorized that this tradition was based on the Secret Gospel’s statement that Jesus initiated Lazarus six days after he raised him. See Talley, “Liturgical Time in the Ancient Church: The State of Research,” Studia Liturgica 14 (1982), pp. 34–51, cited by John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 330. A longer discussion may be found in Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo Publishing Co., 1986).
8.
See in particular, Marvin Meyer, “The Youth in the ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’” Semeia 49 (1990), pp. 129–153; and Raymond E. Brown, “The Arrest of Jesus, Part Three: Naked Flight of a Young Man,” The Death of the Messiah, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 294–297. Morton Smith developed a hypothesis, based on the “Secret Gospel,” that Jesus’ nocturnal baptism of Lazarus was an initiation into an esoteric mystery cult that may have included some kind of “physical” (sexual) union: The Secret Gospel, pp. 89–114. A short discussion with many of these citations is given by C. Clifton Black, Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 139–140 and notes.
9.
Two clarifying articles on this subject include: A.H.C. van Eijk, “Resurrection-Language: Its Various Meanings in Early Christian Literature,” Studia Patristica 12 (1975), 271–276; and J.G. Davies, “Factors Leading to the Emergence of Belief in the Resurrection of the Flesh,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 23 (1972), pp. 449–455. For a comprehensive survey of the topic with helpful bibliography, see Joanne E. McWilliam Dewart, Death and Resurrection (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1986); or Jaroslav Pelikan, The Shape of Death: Life, Death and Immortality in the Early Fathers (New York: Abingdon, 1961). A good general summary of second-century teaching may be found in Pheme Perkins, “Resurrection and Second-Century Christianity,” Resurrection (New York: Doubleday, 1984), pp. 331–390.
10.
Against Heresies 5.13.1. For a more general discussion of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, see 5.7.1–12. Another early defense of the doctrine (perhaps the first full treatise on the subject) was written by Athenagoras, probably around 177 A.D. (On the Resurrection of the Dead).
11.
De resurrectione 53.3 and De carne Christi 12.7
12.
Augustine, Tractate on John 49.20–25; see also Ambrose, Concerning Repentance 2.7.58.
13.
Graydon Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine (Macon: Mercer Univ. Press, 1985), p. 61. Here Snyder cites Eduard Stommel, Beiträge zur Iconographie der konstantinischen Sarkophagplastik (Bonn: Hanstein, 1957), p. 83; and Alfred Stuiber, Refrigerium Interim (Bonn: Hanstein, 1957), pp. 185–186. Other similar analyses include those of Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, The Iconography of the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (Princeton: University Press, 1990), p. 77; and Gertrude Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 1, pp. 181ff.
14.
The fresco from cubiculum O of the Via Latina Catacomb undoubtedly depicts Jesus raising Lazarus. However, the cubiculum C image, with its empty booth, may not be Lazarus. Noting that images of the Exodus and the entry into the Promised Land appear above the empty booth and on the adjacent wall, art historian William Tronzo suggests that the scene in cubiculum C should be identified as Joshua leading the Israelites into the Promised Land. He identifies the empty booth as either the Ark of the Covenant or as the Temple itself, symbolizing Jerusalem. He notes that although the scene was modeled on the image of the raising of Lazarus in cubiculum O, any early Christian viewer would have immediately recognized the empty booth as a variation from the usual depiction of Lazarus’s tomb and would have concluded that this depicted a different scene. (See Tronzo, The Via Latina Catacomb [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1986], pp. 53–56, 66–67.) Both cubicula show images of Moses leading the Israelites through the Red Sea. Perhaps some conflation of the Lazarus, Moses and Joshua stories is suggested. Early Christian writers understood the stories of Joshua crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land and Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea as related to Christian baptism (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 10:1–5; Tertullian, On Baptism 3, 5, 8.9; Clement of Alexandria, Eclogues of the Prophets 5–6). The Lazarus story, with its themes of rebirth and forgiveness from sin, also might refer to baptism.
15.
See the important recent discussion in Thomas Mathews, The Clash of Gods (Princeton: University Press, 1993), chapter 3, “The Magician,” pp. 54–91.
16.
Mathews, The Clash of Gods, p. 61.
17.
Origen against Celsus 68.1
18.
John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus (Harper: San Francisco, 1991), chapter 13, “Magic and Meal,” p. 305.
