5.

1.

In the Russian tradition, above all others, there is a yearning to know more about Lazarus. He is the patron saint of second chances, and his example ought to be instructive. There are times when everyone would like to start again.

In the novel Crime and Punishment (1866), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the student Raskolnikov kills an elderly woman with an axe. He is not instantly struck down by an avenging god, and is further disconcerted by his lack of remorse. He decides to visit his girlfriend Sonya, who is a prostitute, and on her chest of drawers he finds a bible (‘an old one, second-hand, in a leather binding’).

‘ “Where’s the bit about Lazarus?” he asked suddenly . . . “Go, read it!” ’

Sonya then reads to Raskolnikov from John 11, verses 1–44, finishing at ‘Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

‘“That’s all there is about the raising of Lazarus,” she whispered sternly and abruptly, and stood unmoving, turned away to one side, not daring to raise her eyes to him, as though she were embarrassed.’

That’s all there is.

Sonya closes the book, but they both know there should be more. In the aftermath of his crime, Raskolnikov has turned to Lazarus, not to Jesus, because for Dostoyevsky the resurrection of Lazarus is ‘the great and unprecedented miracle’. It promises hope to a true unbeliever, or would do if only more of the story survived. Yes, Lazarus came back to life, but what then, what happened to him next?

The biblical Lazarus fails to provide the guidance that Raskolnikov needs. ‘All she [Sonya] could see was that he was horribly, infinitely unhappy.’

Raskolnikov is Lazarus, disconsolate and unsmiling, ‘infinitely unhappy’, surprised to be alive but uncertain what this life is for.

 

2.

 

They tie his hands, loop a rope around the binding, then fix the rope to the saddle of a Roman horse. This is the second procession of the day from Bethany into Jerusalem, and the less well known of the two because the believers who tell the story of Holy Week are active in the city with Jesus.

‘Where I am, my servant also will be,’ Jesus is saying in the Temple at this precise moment. ‘My father will honour the one who serves me’ (John 12:26).

By the end of the week Jesus will have been arrested, imprisoned, beaten and executed. Even so, on this day in Jerusalem he is at liberty to travel and speak as he wishes. Both the Sanhedrin and now the Romans are preoccupied with Lazarus, who stumbles over trampled palm leaves littering the Jerusalem road. Every time he falters, the rope tugs him onward.

Lazarus, too, is followed by a crowd. The believers are with Jesus, so those who walk with Lazarus do not believe.

‘If that’s him, he’s hardly worth it.’

‘Jesus saved one man in the Jerusalem region.’

‘And calls himself messiah.’

‘Lazarus was his friend.’

‘Isn’t that always the way?’

‘They cooked it up years ago.’

‘And no one saw Lazarus die.’

They toss his name about like an unwanted gift: the malingerer Lazarus, the charlatan, the liar Lazarus of Nazareth. Inside the city walls, women lean out of windows. Men leave their work to catch a glimpse of him.

‘They’re taking him to the fortress.’

‘The Romans have chosen Lazarus. They think he’s the one.’

Children cower behind adult legs, and teenagers compete to look a dead man in the eye. Many hold their hands over their noses.

Lazarus and Jesus have overreached themselves. Nobody with any sense believes in resurrection. Dead is dead. They’re Galileans too far from home, fake messiahs counterfeiting a special relationship with the Jewish god.

‘They’re the same as the rest of us.’

‘No one escapes death.’ On this point everyone can agree. ‘And especially not Lazarus the overseer. He was always a bit strange. I never liked him.’

 

‘Fear would be the wrong response,’ Cassius says. ‘Though to look at, you don’t seem very frightened.’

Cassius polishes an apple, checks his reflected face in the skin. ‘The Antonia Fortress is the safest place in Jerusalem. That’s what we built it to be.’

Lazarus nods. Beside the door, he notices, is a small shrine to Minerva, goddess of victory. Beyond the door, for more pragmatic interventions, two Roman soldiers stand guard. ‘You’re going to kill me.’

Cassius replaces his apple in the fruit bowl which is the centrepiece of a low rectangular table. ‘Help yourself,’ he says. ‘If you’re hungry.’

Lazarus bumps his toes over the tiles in the mosaic floor. If he were dead, how would he know? He imagines he is dead, and it turns out the Romans have conquered everywhere, even the afterlife.

‘If I’m dead you can’t kill me. Therefore I have nothing to fear.’

‘First things first.’

‘So what comes first?’

Cassius clicks his fingers. One of the guards unties Lazarus’s hands. The soldier tries not to touch him, treating Lazarus with the same caution as foreign novelties from previous campaigns. Lazarus is as unlikely as a crocodile, and possibly as treacherous.

‘Stay by the door,’ Cassius tells him.

No one wants to be alone with Lazarus, not even Cassius. Even without the alleged death, the rapid healing is against nature. If he can do this, they all think, what else can he do?

‘I brought you here for your own protection.’

‘I knew it. You’re going to kill me.’

‘That may not solve the problem. For example if you come back again. I’ve called for the garrison doctor. He will be with us shortly.’

Lazarus glances at the doorway. There wouldn’t be soldiers guarding the doors of heaven, not even a Roman heaven, unless heaven wasn’t safe for Romans. And then it wouldn’t be heaven. He can’t sustain this bravado. He is not dead, nor is he fearless. He is alive on earth in the Antonia Fortress, and he is frightened.

‘If we do kill you we’ll do it properly,’ Cassius adds, sensing that at last his words are having an effect. He pushes on. ‘Death the Roman way means crucifixion, and no one comes back from that.’

‘Please. I haven’t broken any laws. Not that I know of.’

‘I was there at the tomb. I saw what happened.’

‘So what did you see? Did I come back from the dead?’

‘In some ways, for your sake, I hope so. If you’re lying then the penalty for false witness is death.’

‘The penalty for everything is death.’

‘That’s justice for you. We’re going to check your physical condition. Take off all your clothes.’

 

3.

 

The Lazarus resurrection, like other supernatural events in the Christian story, can enrage the scholastic mind. “Higher Criti­cism” emerged in Germany in the eighteenth century, and the higher critics subjected the bible to the same objective analysis as other historical documents. Their aim was to establish the truth of biblical narratives.

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), who extended the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) concluded that the Lazarus story was a ‘myth’. In his highly influential Life of Jesus (1863), Ernest Renan considers it a fraud perpetrated by the disciples to grow the Christian community.

Cassius resists such intuitive umbrage, the equivalent of assuming that Lazarus smells. True and false are such primitive categories. He prefers to ask whether the raising of Lazarus can be useful.

In Bethany, a blue-eyed Bedouin lost in the crowd, Cassius had watched Jesus weep. Angry, uncomfortable, Jesus had called Lazarus out from his tomb. The incident had been compellingly staged.

Cassius will admit that Lazarus emerging from the darkness of the tomb, flapping and falling in his funeral rags, had been an unsettling spectacle. Not what he or anyone else had expected. It was unbelievable. He had flung his gourd of water to the ground, put his hands on his hips. This should not be allowed, not after he’d sent his briefing to Rome. He’d confirmed in writing that Lazarus was dead, and claimed this as convincing proof of the weakness of Jesus. In Judaea, he reported, there was currently no identifiable threat.

He has now had a day and a half to subdue his indignation, to rationalise what he’s seen and not to believe his eyes.

Cassius is no stranger to the divine. As a junior officer he’d once stood within twenty paces of the Emperor Tiberius in Rome. He will never come closer to a god on earth, but with the emperor it is easy to tell. He shines. He gives off light.

On this occasion Cassius has decided to be philosophical, in the manner of Cicero: ‘For nothing can happen without cause; nothing happens that cannot happen, and when what was capable of happening has happened, it may not be interpreted as a miracle . . . We therefore draw the conclusion: what was incapable of happening never happened, and what was capable of happening is not a miracle’ (De Divinatione 2: 28, 44 BCE).

Cassius is culturally in sympathy with Cicero’s Roman approach: Lazarus may well have come back from the dead. Fine. Absorbed. One day Rome will discover how and why, even if in every time and place until that day the event will remain a mystery.

To kill him as the Sanhedrin wish to do is a wasted opportunity.

‘I asked you to take off your clothes. I suggest you cooperate.’

 

What is worse than death?

Lazarus being sent to Rome as a trophy. This is the standard imperial response to awkward religious figures. Humiliate the shaman. Lock him in a travelling cage, and parade him naked to Rome.

In the Forum the senators will titter behind their hands at the Jew back from the dead. They will keep him in reserve for an afternoon of applied theology at the Circus—god’s chosen cadet against god’s unblessed beasts. A dilemma to intrigue Caesar himself, if Lazarus is lucky.

But first the senators will ask him what is beyond.

If he fails to answer they will tire of him. Then they will torture him, to ensure he tells the truth. Reason permits deceit, and pain suppresses reason. Lazarus will not lie if his rational faculties are inhibited.

It is a simple question, Lazarus—tell us what is beyond.

They start with the flogging whip, or flagellum, made with straps of leather embedded with glass or nails. If this doesn’t kill him, the torture can progress to more intricate equipment like the equuleus, the ‘young horse’. Iron weights are involved, and a narrow customised bench.

In his Lives of the Twelve Caesars (119 CE) the historian Sue­tonius describes a first-century torture invented by Tiberius (14–37 CE), the emperor at this time. Tiberius would force his victims ‘to drink a great quantity of wine, and presently tie their members with a lute string, that he might rack them at once with the girding of the string, and with the pressure of urine’.

Tiberius will be succeeded by Caligula, notorious for his use of flames and saws. It is at this stage that prisoners call for their mothers, then after that for their god.

If Lazarus insists on remaining silent, refusing even under torture to share his experience of the beyond, the Romans will wash their hands and crucify him.

The agony will be worse than any illness. It may be worse than death.

 

Nothing can surprise Lazarus, not now. This is how he keeps himself calm. He reminds himself that anything can happen, good or bad. In which case, has he learned more than anyone else?

He is lying facedown on the floor, naked, his arms and legs spread in a star. Mosaic squares stipple his belly when he breathes. The doctor, a Greek with a long face, is examining the skin behind his ears.

‘Turn over. Lie on your back.’

The doctor inspects Lazarus’s gums, then thumbs up his eyelids.

‘There’s no smell, is there?’ Cassius is leaning against a wall with his arms crossed.

‘Mosquito bite. Inside of the left knee.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘He’s not invulnerable. And look at his breathing. Like you and me he has to get air to his stomach. His liver has to move blood around the body.’

‘Can he feel pain?’

The doctor pinches his ear, hard. Lazarus jerks away, covering his head. Cassius kicks him his clothes.

‘The worst is over,’ he says. He dismisses the doctor but not the guards at the door. ‘Sit down, Lazarus. Eat an apple.’

While Lazarus dresses, Cassius taps the pads of his fingers against his lower lip, fleshing it out. ‘I have one more question.’

They sit opposite each other. Lazarus takes an apple and bites into it. His gums aren’t perfect—he leaves an imprint of blood on the exposed white flesh.

‘You want to ask what is beyond, don’t you?’

‘No. I want to ask if your god makes mistakes. Roman gods get it wrong all the time.’

The gods Cassius has known since childhood are imperfect, omniscient but not all powerful—they give fire to the titans and the titans are tricked by men. Jupiter shrugs his shoulders. Life goes on.

‘Earlier today Jesus arrived in Jerusalem on a donkey, as prophesied in the Book of Zechariah. I’m a foreigner and even I know that. There are other scriptures predicting a messiah from the line of David who comes from Nazareth. A star will shine brightly above his birthplace in Bethlehem.’

Lazarus reaches for a second apple. They’d studied the verses about the donkey back in Nazareth, and Jesus knows his scriptures.

‘Was there or was there not a star over Bethlehem when you were born?’

‘There was a star over every baby born in the village at that time.’

‘Yes,’ Cassius says. ‘But all of them except you and Jesus are dead. You too came into Jerusalem on a donkey, when you went to the Bethesda pool.’

Lazarus swallows his mouthful of apple. ‘I’m the son of a mason from Galilee. I was born in Bethlehem and fled with my family into Egypt.’

‘Exactly. You’re everything the scriptures said you would be.’ Cassius scratches the skin at the side of his eye. ‘And doesn’t the messiah come back from the dead?’

 

4.

 

Everything is about Jesus these days, and has been for two thousand years.

It is Sunday night, one day after the resurrection of Lazarus, at the start of what has come to be known as Holy Week. During the next seven days Jesus will preach and make promises. He will eventually get himself arrested, tried, crucified and buried, and on the third day he will rise again to judge the quick and the dead.

Lazarus is a precondition for all these events, because the raising of Lazarus inspires the believers who accompany the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This in turn explains why neither the Sanhedrin nor the Romans can take immediate action against Jesus—‘yet they could not find any way to do it, because all the people hung on his words’ (Luke 19:48). Without Lazarus, Jesus would never have lasted until Friday.

As it is, his exact movements between now and then are disputed. For several days Jesus circulates freely while nothing is heard of his friend. The dramatic events towards the end of the week, starting with Thursday night’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, tend to eclipse the days that come before.

At some point, probably on the Monday, Jesus ‘entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the benches of those selling doves’ (Mark 11:15).

Otherwise, across the four canonical gospels, events remain vague until Thursday. Jesus spends Monday to Wednesday ‘teaching in the Temple’ (Luke 21:37). He is sighted at Bethany (Mark 11:11) and on the Mount of Olives (Luke 21:37), which suggests he can move in and out of Jerusalem as he pleases. This is consistent in all four gospels, and his freedom of movement is not entirely explained by the safety-in-numbers aspect of a supportive crowd (Luke 19:48).

Lazarus is the answer. Two thousand years of Jesus has obscured the renown of Lazarus. The Romans have one of the friends safe, so they are less concerned about the other. Jesus is at large in the city because Lazarus is imprisoned in the fortress.

 

‘Are you the king of the Jews?’

‘I’m an overseer of Temple livestock.’

‘Good,’ Cassius says. ‘I don’t think we have a problem with that.’

‘I cast a shadow,’ Lazarus adds. ‘When I get sick I die.’

The great fear in Jerusalem at this time is that any claimant king of the Jews will disrupt the peace between Rome and occupied Judaea. Cassius has a plan, based on the accepted principle that a messiah should aim to do some good. Instead of adding to the tension, a messiah should start by easing political relationships.

“You”re betrothed to marry the daughter of a senior San­hedrin priest.”

‘How would you know that?’

‘Imagine how stable this country could be if a provincial messiah married into the Sanhedrin with the blessing of the Romans. Every angle is covered—all would be sweetness and light. You and I should make a visit to Isaiah, your prospective father-in-law.’

‘I don’t think messiahs get married.’

‘Messiahs can do whatever god ordains.’

Cassius is thinking ahead, already composing his report to Rome, but Lazarus is wilfully slow. ‘You don’t have a choice,’ Cassius says. ‘Look where you are now. This is your destiny.’

‘Because you say so?’

‘Or god does. One or the other. Whichever you prefer—both at the same time.’

‘That doesn’t sound right.’

The consuls in Rome are waiting for positive news, and for Cassius to explain his mistakes. ‘No? Then perhaps you should experience the alternative.’

 

The next confirmed sighting of Lazarus is at the crucifixion of Jesus.

Karel Čapek, who earlier enjoyed his joke about Lazarus dying from a chill, is equally flippant about the crucifixion. Lazarus is resting in Bethany (after the stress of recent events) when he and his sisters hear news of the imprisonment of Jesus. Martha and Mary are confident that Jesus in his turn will be saved by a miracle.

The intervention, they imagine, will come in human form. Jesus will be rescued by those who owe him a debt—the nobleman from Capernaum, the man who picked up his mat and walked, the blind man who now can see. An army of five thousand fed when hungry will descend on Jerusalem to deliver Jesus from harm. Lazarus will be their leader.

Yes, he’d like that very much, only he hasn’t been well: ‘I don’t feel up to all this—the journey, the excitement . . . I should so much have liked to go.’

Čapek’s story is funny because absurd. Lazarus has to be present at the crucifixion. Where else would he be? The idea of his absence is laughable.

There are thousands of figurative representations of the passion and death of Jesus, and in most of the classic images a clean-shaven witness can be found in the keening crowd. From Fra Angelico in 1420 to Max Ernst in 1913, Lazarus is there. Look at a Tintoretto or a Rubens, or any of the masters of the Dutch school. Lazarus attends the crucifixion of Jesus, often in a favoured position at the front left portion of the canvas.

On Friday at midday, Lazarus will be with Jesus on the hill at Golgotha. By that time Lazarus, too, like his sisters in the story by Karel Čapek, will believe he can save his friend.

 

Between the Sunday and Thursday of Holy Week, like the bible itself, Lazarus loses track of time.

His cell in the Antonia Fortress is a narrow room three floors above the level of the street. Lazarus stands on the end of his bed to look through the window high in the wall. A half-starved man might squirm his way through, but the outside walls offer no obvious handholds.

In the street below a cart rolls by. It is filled with straw, heading for the Temple stockyards. The street is very far down. Lazarus would have to be incredibly lucky not to kill himself. Another hay cart passes, and stops directly beneath the window. Lazarus looks down on the driver’s head, and the driver has no idea he’s there.

Lazarus sits on the bed, which is as long as the cell and half as wide. At regular intervals faces peer through the barred opening in the door. He sits on his hands. At least he has his health.

He sleeps.

Cassius bangs on the door. Lazarus wakes up.

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘I was sleeping.’

It is dark. Cassius goes away. Lazarus sits and watches a shiny black cockroach take its chances across the floor. It wants to eat and reproduce and be king of all the cockroaches. Lazarus steps on it.

He lifts his foot, and waits for the cockroach to come back to life. It does so. Several times. As long as he doesn’t step on it too hard.

He flops back on the bed, one arm trailing off the side. He counts the times Jesus has ruined his life.

 

5.

 

Depression is one way in which death shows its strength. Some of the blackness of the tomb remains, and it is the darkness Lazarus can’t endure. The darkness and enclosed spaces and time going by.

Does Jesus know where he is? And had he always known it would come to this, even as a child, when they ran free in the hills above Nazareth?

Lazarus is increasingly sure he’s alive, truly alive, and with every hour that passes it is harder to believe he died. If he’d died, genuinely, then he’d still be dead. He wouldn’t be sighing at the sorrow of life in a cramped Roman cell.

He bites his lip until it bleeds. Later, he plucks out a clutch of eyelashes. He doesn’t believe in resurrection. It wasn’t death that he’d experienced, but some unnatural state of suspension, which Jesus has inflicted upon him.

If he knows. If Jesus has always known.

When Amos drowned he knew, and when Lazarus left Nazareth for Bethany. He knew that selling sheep to the Temple was an ill-omened business, and that Lazarus would never marry or return to the Galilee, would fall sick and die and come back to life and be imprisoned in the Antonia Fortress. This was always the shape his life was going to take.

The white days of their Nazareth childhood tilt and catch a different light. They have a dark underside and make unwelcome shadows: there is no coincidence and there is no luck. The story of Lazarus is a device in the life of Jesus.

Lazarus is overcome with self-pity. That’s right, Lazarus, it isn’t fair. Fall on your knees and blub. Whine and cry. Wish that you were dead.

He crawls across the cell and plants his forehead flush against the rough plastered wall. It is a long time since he prayed, and in the past he was always relieved when no one answered. It was a solace to know that he was on his own, and that whatever happened was up to him.

Now he genuinely hopes to be heard, but has forgotten how to do it. Lazarus has mislaid his certainty about what he wants, or what is worth having.

He curls up on the floor and puts his hands flat between his thighs. The mosquito bite on his knee is healing, life’s miracle at work. His body is renewing itself for no obvious reason, and he grieves for his overlaid childhood. He grieves for his vanished future and his poor, deserted sisters. He grieves his own ugly death, and his plans that have come to nothing.

Lazarus weeps.

 

Inside Isaiah’s house, the tables and chairs are so neatly arranged it is clear that visitors are barely welcome. There is a background hush of shuffling, of women taking up position to eavesdrop.

‘Lazarus would have liked to be here,’ Cassius says, ‘but he is temporarily indisposed. He wanted to apologise for his unseemly behaviour at the betrothal. I know it’s no excuse, but at the time he wasn’t feeling well.’

‘I’m honoured that a Roman official should take an interest.’

Isaiah has an urgent meeting with the Sanhedrin. He is in full priest’s regalia but he bows nevertheless. Not so deeply that his eyes leave Cassius. ‘If you’ve come about Jesus, we priests in Jerusalem know where he’s hiding. The situation is under control.’

Cassius nods. Religion doesn’t have to cause trouble, not when managed correctly.

‘We’ll take care of Jesus, I promise,’ Isaiah says. ‘We don’t approve of civic disturbances of any kind.’

‘That’s why I’m here. I want to persuade you to look ahead, take a broader view. Lazarus too has his followers. He doesn’t make promises he can’t keep—no pulling down the Temple and rebuilding it in three days. Give Lazarus a second chance.’

‘Too late. We already have plans for Lazarus.’

‘Let him marry Saloma, for the good of everyone involved.’

‘Lazarus died. That normally annuls any betrothal.’

‘Is that why you voted for the Sicarii to intervene? Or was it just to free Saloma from a marriage contract?’

‘That wasn’t my decision. Every member of the Sanhedrin was there.’

‘As well as some Roman spies. Call off the assassin. Let Lazarus live.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Then Lazarus can’t heal your daughter.’

Isaiah takes a step forward, eyes narrowed. ‘Of course he can’t. Nobody can. She’s beyond help.’

‘Lazarus came back from the dead,’ Cassius says, meeting Isaiah’s gaze. ‘What more does a messiah have to do?’

‘Heal the innocent. Yes. We all know that. Me, you, Jesus and every Judaean from here to kingdom come. Healing should be any messiah’s first and most important task ’

For twenty-five years Isaiah has accepted god’s gift of a daughter who can’t keep food in her mouth. She can be treated for months at a time with no visible improvement to her leg, and healers have proved worse than useless. Yanav gave her a drink of leaves and seawater while three miles away the dead came back to life. Why is his love and devotion unrewarded?

‘Agree to the marriage,’ Cassius says. ‘You’ll see what Lazarus can do.’

 

On Thursday morning, after four days and nights in a Roman cell, Lazarus wakes up with the hard weight of his head on one ear, and hears the march of approaching soldiers. He startles upright, and the footsteps go quiet. He lies down again and listens, crunch, crunch, but the sandals are not coming closer. It is the sound of the pulse in his neck, a stomping at the back of his jaw.

He decides to kill himself, as an act of revenge.

He sits upright, rubs his fingers over his cheeks and chin, but his deadly razor is back in the house in Bethany. He hasn’t shaved for eight days, including being dead, and he’ll soon look like a believer in god. The lie is too much to bear.

He stands on the end of the bed. His shoulders are level with the sill of the window. If he can get his head through, and then his shoulders, he knows the rest of him will follow. He has been ill. The muscles in his upper body are not what they were. Everything is ordained.

He pulls himself up, turns his head sideways and hauls his shoulders through. His body scrapes halfway out before his hands confirm no holds on either side of the outside wall. Directly below him a cart full of straw rolls by. It does not stop beneath the window.

He is stuck headfirst out of a window on the third floor of the Antonia Fortress. His lower legs are braced against the ceiling to keep him in, and there is a fatal drop to the cobbles of the street below. He is not a favoured son of god. That would be a terrible misjudgement to make.

Now is the time. He angles his body downwards and straightens his legs. He slips through the window, turns in the air, his legs coming over behind him. The last thing he sees, looking above, is the empty sky over Israel.

It is cloudless, a clear blue eye.

 

The crucifixion of Jesus is designed to attract attention. It says Look at Me, in direct competition with the resurrection of Lazarus. Jesus needs to outshine the great and unprecedented miracle, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. If he fails to do so, there may be uncertainty about which is the main event.

Lazarus is the latest in a series of resurrections that viewed together look like experiments: Lazarus, the son of the widow of Nain, and before that the daughter of Jairus in Capernaum. All three are trial resurrections, prototypes. Jesus is testing the limits of the form.

Years earlier, on the shore of the lake in Galilee, Jesus had learned that siblings should be spared. No one should have to suffer, like Lazarus, the death of a brother or sister. The daughter of Jairus, who will die, is therefore an only child. Jesus then discovers, because she is a daughter, that grief is equally unbearable for a father.

For his next attempt, in the village of Nain, he picks an only child whose mother is a widow. No brothers, no fathers. The widow has experience of death, but her suffering too is astonishing. The outright grief of the parent confuses the value of the resurrection, because if Jesus can bring children back to life, it would be kinder to save them before they die.

Jesus lacks the human instinct. He tries again.

Lazarus is next, and as Jesus learns compassion he improves the basic setup. Lazarus is not a child. His parents will not suffer. Resurrection is going to damage the fewest number of people if it involves an unmarried adult who has lost his parents and has no children.

Martha and Mary can’t be helped. No one is entirely alone, and like the widow of Nain the sisters have experience of death. They already know what it’s like to lose a brother. Also, they have each other. God can’t think of everything.

By this stage Jesus has understood that Lazarus needs to be buried. In the two previous resurrections, life had returned too soon, and witnesses will take every opportunity to disbelieve. If the bodies aren’t buried, a faked death or deep trance lingers as a possibility. Jesus corrects this flaw with Lazarus. His friend is dead four days, buried for two. Martha mentions the smell.

Lazarus is by far the best designed of the three trial resurrections, though room for improvement remains. He is called from the tomb in public, but the hardened cynics and Sadducees still insist doggedly that nobody saw him die.

Jesus registers this objection. He intends to stage an undeniably public death.

 

Lazarus lands on his back in a cart of straw.

Immediately after he lands, the cart jolts and starts moving forward.

His body is unscathed. He wipes the straw out of his eyes and mouth. The cart, carrying feed for the sacrificial animals, will be heading for the Temple. Jesus spends his days at the Temple, and the two men are yet to sit and talk, but Lazarus refuses to be pushed around like this. If he can’t kill himself he’ll save himself, he alone, without the help of Jesus. He can be his own saviour, correct his own mistakes.

Saloma first. He’ll apologise for the charade of their betrothal, and set her free. Then Lydia.

He climbs out of the moving cart, and takes shelter in the shadow of a wall. No one has seen him. He walks, then runs, in the opposite direction to the Temple entrance and Jesus.

At Isaiah’s house, they are expecting him.

‘How can that be? How did you know I was coming?’

‘A Roman called Cassius claims you can help us.’

‘Cassius didn’t send me. I wanted to talk about Saloma.’

‘We know.’

In an upper room, with lamps alight, Isaiah’s women have attempted to soften the atmosphere—they don’t have Lydia’s experience. Saloma is overdressed and areas of the uncovered wall make harsh reflections from the flames. She is lying in a nest of cushions. Her bare feet twitch in terror. She whimpers, turns to the wall and buries her face in her arms.

Isaiah and his wife accompany Lazarus to the room. After four days in a Roman cell he stinks of sweat but neither of them cover their noses.

‘Signs and wonders,’ Isaiah says, gesturing towards Saloma in the corner. ‘Now is your chance to make me believe.’

‘That isn’t why I came. I wanted to tell you we can’t get married.’

‘You are betrothed,’ her mother says.

Isaiah nods. ‘By law you can touch my daughter.’

Lazarus feels the strength of their longing. They want so much to believe that Lazarus, even against their instincts, is true. He kneels beside Saloma and she bangs her head against the wall. Then she covers her ears with a blanket. He reaches out towards her, stops, feels the heat from her hunched shoulders on his hand.

‘Heal her!’ Isaiah desperately wants Cassius to be right. Lazarus has died and is now alive and he will touch Saloma and through this miraculous contact Saloma will be healed. ‘You or Jesus, I don’t care which. Come on, Lazarus. Do some work.’

Lazarus rocks back and stands up. He has not touched Saloma. He realises, possibly for the first time, that he is not the equal of Jesus.

‘I’m not a healer.’

‘You didn’t even try.’

‘You’d have to ask Jesus,’ Lazarus says. ‘And probably believe in him too.’

Isaiah flares his nostrils. ‘That’s very convenient, because Jesus has gone into hiding. Somewhere in the Lower City, with the thieves and prostitutes. How can he help if we don’t know where he is?’

‘I’ll find him for you. I used to know my way around.’