The name Lazarus turns up in two places in the Bible. One is a friend of Jesus, who lived at Bethany and was the brother of Martha and Mary. We read about him in John 11 and 12 – he is the one who dies but then called forth from the tomb. The other is a character in a story Jesus told in Luke 16, about an unnamed rich man and a beggar called Lazarus. Actually, the rich man is sometimes called Dives but that is from the Latin translation and is simply the Latin for ‘wealthy’; in modern English, perhaps we should call him Rich! Lazarus, or ‘Lazaros’ in the original Greek text, is believed to come from the Hebrew name Eleazar, which means ‘God has helped’. Old Rich certainly didn’t extend any help in that direction but, when they die, Lazarus finds himself comforted by Abraham while Rich is in torment.

In the Bible study we attended this afternoon, we pondered the question of why the beggar character was called Lazarus. Further research online says it was a common name in 1st century Judea but that argument is typically backed up by citing the friend of Jesus and the fictional beggar. I can believe names like Mary or Simon were common, because we find multiple real people called by them in the New Testament, but I’m less convinced about Lazarus and I can’t lay my hands on sources outside the Bible to take that further.

I wonder if the character was named because Jesus had a friend called Lazarus? The story probably comes before that Lazarus was raised (the latter not long before the ‘triumphal entry’, which we find in John 12 and Luke 19) so there could be an element of divine foreknowledge? It is certainly true that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the truth of the words spoken by Abraham (yes, definitely that Abraham although still as a character in a story) that those blinded by wealth wouldn’t believe even if they saw someone raised from the dead. Luke’s account shows that Jesus was telling the story to Pharisees who sneered at him and loved money more than the history of Moses and the prophets that they should have been experts in!