Where in the Bible Dies It Say Where Lazarus Died Again

The death, resurrection, and second death of Lazarus June 21, 2013 Peter T. Chattaway

One of the recurring themes in the Gospel of John is that the people healed by Jesus faced ostracism and worse from some of their fellow Jews. You can run into it in the story of the human being who was built-in bullheaded: afterwards Jesus gave him sight, he was thrown out of the synagogue for refusing to deny that Jesus was the Messiah. And yous can meet it in the story of Lazarus: after Jesus raised him from the dead, he became such a celebrity that the chief priests plotted to have him killed.

This last item is frequently forgotten in dramatic depictions of the raising of Lazarus — maybe because John'southward gospel never tells us whether the plot succeeded — but a few films take best-selling it 1 fashion or another. Three come to mind.

First, and most plainly, there is The Gospel of John (2003), a mostly word-for-discussion adaptation of the gospel which, naturally, has to incorporate this detail somehow.

The film is narrated by Christopher Plummer, and when he gets to the passage about Lazarus's newfound fame, the motion-picture show shows Lazarus getting up from his table and walking to the window, where he tin can hear the crowds calling his proper noun.

As Plummer goes on to mention the plot against Lazarus's life, Lazarus turns and looks back at Jesus with a troubled wait on his confront. And that'south about it.

Two other films have gone further than this and have shown people carrying out the plot — and in both cases, the man who really murders Lazarus is none other than Saul, the persecutor of Christians who volition one twenty-four hours convert to the religion and, nether the proper noun Paul, become the nearly prolific contributor to the New Attestation.

In The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Paul is a Zealot who kills Lazarus to destroy the show of Jesus' greatest miracle. The murder is preceded by an odd fleck of dialogue in which Lazarus, who doesn't seem terribly happy to be alive, says he was surprised to observe that in that location wasn't much difference between death and life:

And and so, there is Jesus, the Spirit of God (2007), an Iranian moving-picture show which tells the story of Jesus from a Muslim point of view. In this moving picture, Paul is hired by the principal priests to impale Lazarus — and he does so belatedly at night, in the street:

Not surprisingly, both films have a rather dim view of Paul overall. Jesus, the Spirit of God limits its treatment of Paul to this 1 episode and casts a rather brutish-looking actor in the role, while The Last Temptation of Christ suggests that Paul went on to invent Christianity without any interest in whether it was true or not.

Some Christians might recoil at the proposition that Paul himself took part in this plot. Only given the biblical Paul'south connections to the priesthood, and given that he was involved with the martyrdom of Stephen and others before his conversion, it is not incommunicable that he would have been involved in the plot against Lazarus, also.

The more interesting point, for me, is that the resurrection of Lazarus was not entirely the happy, triumphant thing that many films make it out to exist. Aye, it was an incredible instance of Jesus' miraculous power; and yeah, it was a potent symbol of the more than-permanent resurrection that awaited Jesus and, through him, awaits humanity every bit a whole. But the fact remains: Lazarus did dice a second time. And according to John's gospel, it might have happened sooner, rather than later.

April 2, 2015 update: The Lumo Project released their own version of The Gospel of John on Netflix concluding yr, and so of course they had to address this role of the story too — and they do this mainly past showing a couple shots of the primary priests talking to each other while the narrator describes how they made plans to kill Lazarus:

— The epitome at the top of this postal service is from the 2003 version of The Gospel of John.

garrisbacticeived.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/filmchat/2013/06/the-death-resurrection-and-second-death-of-lazarus.html

Share this post