Solo

I think so. It appears that John's 11 chapter preserved enough of the original text the gospeller was modifying that the original tale and raison d'etre for it can be extracted without much trouble.

It is possible that the earlier story features another version of mythical Jesus, but I don't think so. The tale's plot is based on Jesus' error of missing a day and not returning to a ritually entombed Lazarus (the name is symbolical and was probably supplied later). The sisters were scared of, and upset at, Jesus' entombing their brother and asked him to call off the magical rite when their brother complained of his discomfort in the cave at the start. Jesus refuses but stays two days nearby to intervene if necessary. Then he takes off and misses the appointed day of his return and Lazarus' extraction.

Lazarus evidently does fall asleep in the tomb. The sisters panic when he does not respond to them (as before) and Jesus does not show up. They are too scared of Jesus' spells to enter the tomb themselves. They conclude their brother is dead for real and the word spreads. As the neighbours console the sisters, Jesus re-appears. He tries to quietly separate them from the mourners and wake up Lazarus without causing too much fuss but 'the Jews' (I believe Schonfield was right in reading that as "Judeans") follow Mary to Jesus and he is forced by the circumstance to make it seem he is reviving a dead man.

This tale is evidently of a Galilean origin and illustrates the differences between Jesus' baptismal practice and Phariseic concept of resurrection. It portrays the Southerners (Judeans) as hostile, superstitious and easily fooled.

Here is the English version of the presumed prototext for John 11 and glossary of the manipulation.

I would like to have critical comments.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Lazarus – reduction to the original proto-text

Symbols: <> presumed deletions of text by John
[A] guiding comments / contrasting narration written into proto-text by John (unclassed)
[B] articulation of Jesus prescience of Lazarus death/resurrection by John
[C] confession, Christological titles, credal manifests by John
[D] dependence on John’s creation of “two Bethanies”: a spatial separation of Jesus from Lazarus at the start of the story.
[E] John’s projection of proto-Christian beliefs into the action of Sanhedrin


1.<> Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.
2. <>[A][C]
3. So the sister sent to him, saying, ‘master, he whom you love is ill’.
4. But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘this illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God, <>[C]’.
5. [A]
6. [So] when he heard that he was ill, he stayed two days longer where he was.
7. Then after this he said, “Let us go <>[D]….”
8. <>[A]
9. Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours in the day ?. If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world.
10. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.’
11. Thus he spoke and then he said to them: ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him out of sleep’.
12. The disciples said to him, ‘[C], if he has fallen asleep, he will recover’.
13.-16. <>[A][B][C]
17. Now when Jesus came, <>[A] Lazarus was in the tomb four days.
18. <>[A][D]
19. and many of the Judeans had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother.
20. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary sat in the house.
21. Martha said to Jesus: ‘master, if had been here, my brother would have not died’.
22. <>?[C]
23. Jesus said to her, ‘your brother will rise again’.
24. Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day’.
25-27. <>[B][C]
28. And when he said this, she went and and called her sister in secret (‘lathra’), ‘the teacher is here and is calling for you.
29. And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him.
30. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him.
31. When the Judeans who were with her in the house, saw Mary rose quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to weep there.
32. Then Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet saying to him, ‘master, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
33. When Jesus saw her weeping and the Judeans who came with her also weeping, he was very angry and upset (enebrimhsato).
34.- 37 <>[A]
38. Then Jesus, angry and upset again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.
39. [A]..Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him “master, by this time there will be an odour for he has been <>[there ?]/[A] for four days”.
40.-42 <>[A][B][C]
43. When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out” !
44. The dead man came out..<>[A].
45. Many of the Judeans [therefore] who had come with Mary and had seen what he did believed <> ?[in him].
46. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.
47.-48. <>?[E]
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Note: the reference to 'odour' in 39. looks like a deliberate setup for the condemnation of Jesus by the 'disbelievers' of 46. They would enter the burial cave and report Jesus after finding it smelled of urine and feces.

Jiri

Solo

A few questions to consider:

1) Jesus stays in Beth'abara (30 miles away) because in (the other) Bethany his friend is ill. Why ? Could it realistically be an example of anything else than a flagrant aporia ?
2) Does the verse 4. indicate Jesus' prescience of Lazarus death or merely Jesus' familiarity with the nature of illness that Lazarus suffers from ?
3) Is Jesus really speaking of himself as the 'light of this world' in 9. ? Is Lazarus' 'stumbling' in the night allusion to his 'illness' ? How does 1 Thess 5:2-8 relate to the passage ?
4) Who introduces the idea that Lazarus is actually dead in the tale ?
5) Someone had to tell Martha Jesus returned to the village. Right ? Someone had to tell Jesus, if he was human, that there were people in Mary&Martha's house who believed Lazarus was actually dead. Right ?
6) Jesus insists on having the sisters at the grave alone, without the mourners. Does his anger (in 38 & 38) relate to the presence of the grievers he sought to avoid ?
7) Why do omniscient ask questions ? (34) (No smart-alecky answers, please )
8) Why does Jesus weep when if he has certainty he is the resurrection and the life and he is minutes away from reviving Lazarus ?
9) Why did Hoskyns called 44. 'a miracle within miracle' ? Does it relate to John's inability to correctly gauge the effect of his converting a story into a theological treatise ? Note the rapidly changing emotions in Jesus as reported by John: 25-26=absolute self-confidence, 28=fear(asking Martha to call Mary alone, hiding from the mourners), 33=anguish-anger, 35=sorrow, 38=anguish/anger again, 41=absolute self-confidence again (thanking Father for a miracle that hasn't happened yet.).......etc, etc. Can one explain that in some way ?

Jiri

Amaleq13

Can you expand on your support for the involvement of ritual entombment, please?

Solo

The idea struck the first time I read the Bible, at the age of forty, under circumstances that I have described here recently. I had no training or exegetical knowledge, except for Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible which I used as a parallel read through the books.

By the time I got to John's gospel (I read in everything in sequence), I had formed a mental picture of Jesus, imagining him to be essentially a bright guy who, like many others, experienced a radical collapse of personality in midlife through a sudden onset of bipolar imbalance, and coping with it the best he could. Some people find a way to dramatize themselves succesfully when they are in crisis, so I reasoned, it was no different in Jesus. He would try to grasp intellectually what he was experiencing using the resources that he had, and second, try to relay and validate his "discovery" of the mysterious, unseen order, through the acquisition of disciples. Most people, think of those who have mental challenges as being permanently incapacitated, but there are of course disorders where that is far from the truth. Some bipolars are great organizers. Winston Churchill was a bipolar close to clinical strength, (and I am sure we have been spared many an example in his biographies of his lapses) and yet it was a great leader, and his indomitable spirit perhaps the greatest asset the Brits had during WWII. Hitler at times frankly florid, was a classical (sha)manic personality, who could masterfully organize his personal visions of Reich-to-come into a political program of Apocalypse. We do not think of him as mentally challenged, although his bizzare quirks and pathetic outbursts were the stuff of legend well before he became the Chancellor. (Shirer reported that he was known to chew on a carpet in his paroxysms of rage. This however may be a yarn, since "Teppichfresser" is an old Berlin slang for a fit-taker).

At the first reading of the NT, I took naively everything about Jesus as history, except the miracles, which I - a rationalist at heart - took to mean symbolic rendering of psi phenomena which (I had an experiential proof) are present in people seen by others as gone off the deep end. It was only later, after I read Wells, that I had decided, that many thngs that Jesus said and done, related to psi phenomena which were symbolically rendered as Jesus, i.e. created by others and presented as Jesus.

So reading John 11, it was clear to me that Jesus did not bring back to life a stinking corpse. Yet, right off the bat something did not quite add up in the story, or rather the way the story was told. There were too many self-contradictory statements and a bizzare conclusion, in which a miracle is acknowledged by all witness, but some go complain to the authorities, who decide the man with powers to bring men back from death is a nuisance and menace and must be dealt with harshly. So, I reasoned that if I was sitting in the Sanhedrin and a report came that there is this guy who brings people from the dead, my sphincter would have been in knots if it had a small chance to be true, or I would have voted with the majority to nail him if he was just messing with graves and people's heads.

The story then is just told too weirdly to be a sheer phantasy. It looked to me right from the start as though someone knowing it happened one way wanted to make it look like it happened another way. The unbelief of those who witness Jesus performing the miracle, simply cancels the mythical panoply which John has constructed over the story, and allows the reality racket to romp with impunity over the supernatural. This is not a structure of a myth. This is a thought pattern of someone who is disturbed (,does not matter how brilliant. Wilhelm Reich could perform "psychic cures" which had a real and durable effect while believing his dog was being molested by extraterrestrials).

Another thing I noted right at the first of the NT, and that is the similarities between Gerasene demoniac of Mark (and its Matthean expansion) and Lazarus. In both stories,

1) Jesus has an encounter with a man in a cemetery;
2) the man's suffering relates to Jesus' understanding of or role in the eschaton;
3) Jesus is enjoined to stop the suffering (in L. by the sisters who sent to him);
4) Jesus raises the sufferer;
5) Jesus is rejected by the community, in L. with fatal consequences. (Never mind the Fretensis of demons; that is Mark's coverup of the real reason Jesus was asked to leave the neighbouhood).

These seemed significant parallels, so much so that I accepted initially the Secret Mark's "Lazarus" as quite plausible.

Why did Jesus use ritual entombments ? I believe, on the evidence of the "cave birth mythology", "let the dead bury their dead", Simon Magus tales, the use of the catacombs in Jerusalem and Rome, the ordinance of Caesar from Nazareth, the charge that Christians practiced necromancy, Julian, the tradition of praying in the tombs (e.g. St.Pachomius), and placing the bodies of saints in the crypts of churches (to this day), that Jesus experimented with sensory deprivation (of course not realizing it was "that") to force the "photism" phenomena which he associated with the coming Danielic son of man (later unio mystica with Christ). Simple reasoning from analogy, if Jesus received the "body full of light" in a cave in the dark, would have led him to a query whether such experience may be reproduced by suppressing sleep in the dark of a cave. Creating a ritual around the expiry of one's dead self, and playing it out using real tombs, would have increased the level of stress and led to the temporal lobe destabilization needed to get the "God in the brain" going. However, the two episodes of Gerasene Demoniac and Lazarus show that it was a risky proposition prone to freakouts in the novices and a grave sense of injury on the part of the community.

Jiri

mountainman

The question "Is Lazarus based on a real incident?"
will be answered in accordance to the chronology
to be associated to the new testament writings.

IE: When were the gospels first published?

If we assume the gospels were first published in the
first or second centuries we would answer in one way.

However if we were to assume the gospels were first
physically communicated and published in the third or
fourth centuries (and we do know that they must have
been published by at least the fourth), then we would
answer in another, seeing that the work of Philostratus,
published c.220 CE, contained reference to the miracle
work (including a resurrection account) of the neopythagorean
author, sage and philosopher Apollonius of Tyana.

The answer to this question is dependent upon the
hypothesis assumed in arriving at chronology.

Let me repeat in no uncertain terms that noone on this
forum, or elsewhere for that matter, has yet demonstrated
to me any one single scientifically assessible and/or
archeologically analysable citation that provides unambigous
testimony that christianity existed prior to the 4th century.

We have been delivered a chronology in the fourth century
in which we have placed, for a large number of reasons since
the time of Nicaea, a great deal of faith. We need to ask
whether or not the chronology has integrity with respect
to twenty-first century scientific technology, and be
prepared to accept the answers.

Solo

Pete, I know you too have a theory. Here, though the issue is not at all the chronology of published Christian writings but their internal structure.
And the query that I have is whether we can come reasonably close to puzzling out the historical development of the movement on the analysis of the texts themselves. And in that I do not have in mind the Formgeschichte (although I agree it is an invaluable analytical tool) as much as the type of analysis that I have not seen done yet but which I believe is long overdue, the analysis of cognitive structures in narration.

People tell stories, profane or sacred, with a specific purpose in mind. That purpose "organizes" the story. Typically, the minimum will be some lead-in info, plot, and denouement. If some stories are difficult to read in that an organization of the narrative does not "follow" the intended message or moral, there can be a number of reasons for it. In John's Lazarus, a specific host of issues needs to be looked at:

1) John is mentally disorganized. Even (or maybe, especially,) geniuses have a tendency to drop "lesser" balls in aligning their visions. Dostoievski's narrating errors caused nightmares to his editors. At least half a dozen of scenes in Crime and Punishment had to rewritten (for the book edition), as they contradicted other statements and subplots. No-one has taken care of that for "John", as not many people had the confidence to correct the text that soon became a relic, and the church's theological manual.

2)Two, did John work with a script which he considered "unviolable" in its essence, i.e. an account of the Lord's doings, which however was told by people whom John considered at best uninstructed and at worst "thieves and robbers" (he had just dealt with in chapter 10) ?

3) If John worked out Lazarus from a text before him, how much of the original narrative can be recovered from John ? How do we determine that ? What criteria do apply ?

I had great fun reading scores of exegets trying to square Jn 11:5-6 with the intent of John to portray Jesus as "prescient" of L's expiry. It is an absolutely useless exercise. The great mystery originates with John's "relocating" Jesus' camp which was in the vicinity of Lazarus' village to Perea to ratify Jesus' innocence in Lazarus' poor health. But he forgets that the original text which he preserved in 6., i.e. Jesus staying where he was when he heard of the illness, belies his being removed miles and miles. The concession to the sisters was that he was going to monitor the situation (and intervene if necessary). The unsurmountable barrier for John's edit is the fact v.6 intimates that Jesus was responding to the cry for help in doing what he was doing: i.e. remaining on stand-by. In the original tale then Jesus walks away from Lazarus village after two days, again something which is supported by v.11. It has been keenly noted by Bultmann that the desire to go to Lazarus (in 11.) makes the veil fall again on the mysterious background of the story, by ignoring the same intent implied in verse 7.

Think about it, Pete. There was something going on other than Eusebius.

Jiri