This thesis sets out to analyse how and why Lazarus, the man who according to the
Gospel of John was raised from the dead by Jesus, came to be acknowledged a saint
in Western Christendom.
Despite the importance assigned to the miracle of his resurrection in patristic
writing from the second century onwards, there is no evidence to suggest that
Lazarus was thought of as a saint in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. During
the centuries of Christian persecution martyrdom was the route to sanctity and
Lazarus, raised from the dead, was martyrdom’s mirror image. The early pilgrims
who visited the tomb in Bethany where Lazarus was said to have lain dead for four
days did not know the circumstances of his second final death, nor where his body
lay.
However, at the end of the ninth century the bones of Lazarus were believed to
have been discovered in Cyprus. They were brought to Constantinople and
venerated as those of the island’s first bishop. He was of especial interest to the
emperor, who, it was said, shared through Lazarus friendship with Jesus. The new
dynasty of German emperors founded by Otto I aspired to share in this friendship
and the evidence provided by the distribution of relics of Lazarus indicates they
were used to cement the authority of the German Church and state.
Ownership of the relics of Lazarus confirmed that the course of salvation history
ran through the lands of the West. Churchmen from the end of the eleventh
century reinterpreted theologians of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and
in particular Augustine, to argue that with the resurrection of Lazarus guardianship
of God’s redemptive plan for humanity passed from the Jews to the Christian
Church and, by extension, from East to West.
By the turn of the millennium Lazarus was venerated as a saint in the West but
nowhere was his cult established. For this, Lazarus needed to become recognised
as a local saint. This recognition emerged in two cities in France, Autun and
Marseille, for different reasons and with varying success. In Marseille, the story of
Lazarus was adapted to conform to the local tradition which attributed the conversion of the West to legendary founding bishops with biblical authority. Here
Lazarus had to vie with older and more recent saints for patronage of that city.
In contrast, following the construction of Saint-Lazare at Autun, his patronage of
this city was never contested. The Church at Autun had adopted the Lazarus of the
Ottonians in order to assert that they were the inheritors of a spiritual authority
that originated in the New Testament. With the construction of Saint-Lazare, itself
a product of the conviction that the city really did possess the body of Lazarus, they
ensured the durability of his cult there.
In doing so, the Church in Autun also created a saint who was not only a means by
which the Church could understand its institutional role in salvation history. His cult
having been established, Lazarus also assisted Christians as individuals in the
contemplation of their own final destination. These became possible with the
construction of a purgatorial afterlife encompassing post-mortem redemption.