What happened to Lazarus?
There are conflicting traditions, but only one is really credible.
Lazarus died. Lazarus rose. Lazarus died again. And he will rise again.
Unlike many saintly legends in which the fact and fiction can be hard to tease apart, the life and death of Lazarus falls into two neat traditions with a common core. One of them is plausible, and one of them is not.
At the core of both traditions is the story that Jews seized Mary, Martha, Lazarus and some other Christians and set them adrift in a boat without sails, oars, or rudders. In the western tradition, the boat found its way to Provence, France, and the family split up to evangelize the heathens. Lazarus went to Marseille, where he became its first bishop before falling to the headsman during the Diocletian persecutions. Before his execution, he was kept prisoner in a cave, which tradition holds is beneath the Saint-Lazare Prison.
In 415, John Cassian founded the Abbey of St. Victor south of Marseille’s Old Port, above a necropolis where Lazarus was alleged to have hidden from persecutors, and where his body had been laid. These relics were later translated to Autun, with his head left in the church of Saint-Lazare. There's another tomb claimed in Burgundy, as well as a tear Jesus shed for him, neither of which are credible.
None of these Lazarus legends have any grounding in verifiable history, although it's possible another Lazarus lay at its roots. The tradition doesn't emerge until around the 11th century, and the fate of Lazarus is barely recorded in The Golden Legend except for a mentions in the lengthy entries concerning his sisters1.
The western traditions of both Mary and Martha are far richer than that of their brother, who had a starring role in Jesus's most spectacular miracle. This suggests the lack of a strong western cult until the time of the Crusades, when the Order of St. Lazarus was founded at a leper hospital in Jerusalem in the 1130s, and people went looking for European links.
Lazarus traditions evolved in print through accounts of the visions he is imagined to have seen while dead. Thus, the Visio Lazari (Vision of Lazarus) proposes to be his description of torments he witnessed, while in fact it simply adapts the 12th century Elucidarium of Honorius of Autun, which described nine sins and their modes of punishment.2 The Lazarus texts date somewhere within the 14th to 15th century, but suggest earlier traditions that arose with the popularity of didactic purgatorial visions.
The meagre literary merits of the Lazarus tradition have earned it little love, with some calling its poor use of “the cliches of the genre most lamentable.” 3 Lazarus certainly fared better in art.
Okay, So What Really Happened?
The first tomb of Lazarus is a popular pilgrimage site in Bethany, on the southeast slope of the Mount of Olives, with textual evidence dating back to at least the 4th century. The traditions are reasonable and little argues against them. The village probably grew around the tomb, which is a cave located in a necropolis used for burials in the first century. The growth of shrines, churches, and long-term veneration, and the lack of viable alternative sites, argues for the legitimacy of the site. Christians (Catholic and Orthodox) and Muslims all venerate the location.
Eastern traditions about the fate of Lazarus after the resurrection seem to hew closer to the truth. They often begin with the boat incident, but the boat winds up in Cyprus, or sometimes they just arrive there as part of their evangelical mission. Lazarus establishes a church in Kition (Larnaca, Cyprus today), lives for another 30 years, then dies about the age of 60 and is buried there for the final time.
Some traditions are tied to this--the Virgin Mary herself wove his vestments and he didn't smile for the rest of his life because he was filled with horror over the visions of hell he saw while he was dead--but not much else. Deep Biblical connections to the location are suggested by the fact that the see of Kition was declared self-governing at the Council of Ephesus.
In 890, a sarcophagus was found in Kition with the inscription Lazarus Four Days Dead Friend of Jesus. The Byzantine Emperor Leo VI had the remains translated to Constantinople in 898 (an event commemorated on October 17th), but they were taken in the Crusader sack of 1204. This is likely when Marseille enters the narrative, as the Crusaders return with the relics, which are later lost.
After the remains were removed from Kition/Larnaca, Leo had the Church of St. Lazarus built on the site. It became a mosque under the Ottomans, but was eventually sold back to the Orthodox. In 1972, following a fire, a sarcophagus was uncovered beneath the altar with a few human remains inside. These are widely believed to belong to Lazarus. In addition, a reliquary consisting of the right foot of Lazarus was acquired by the Order of Saint John, and is kept in the Conventual Church of St John the Baptist at Valletta.
Lazarus is all over the calendar, but is remembered in the Western Church on July 29th, along with his sisters. In the old calendar, he was venerated on December 17. In the East, there is Lazarus Saturday (before Palm Sunday), March 17, and October 17. Cuba still celebrates San Lázaro on December 17.
St. Jacobus conflates Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene, adding an extra layer of confusion.
The number of sins in these traditions tend to oscillate: nine sins and punishments are sometimes used in imitation of Virgil's nine circles (as seen later in Dante), and as a dark mirror of the nine choirs of angels, while seven sins are sometimes used in emulation of St. Gregory the Great's seven capital sins.
Gallagher, Edward J. "THE 'VISIO LAZARI', THE CULT, AND THE OLD FRENCH LIFE OF SAINT LAZARUS: AN OVERVIEW." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 90, no. 3/4, 1989, pp. 331--39. Accessed 29 July 2025.
This is awesome! It was cool to recognize the photos from the article as from the tomb in Cyprus, because I was just there! Amazing!
I'm very interested in the line of study that Lazarus is St John the Apostle. a real head turner.