Raising of Lazarus participant Lazarus of Bethany
Raising of Lazarus
The raising of Lazarus is a miracle of Jesus recounted only in the Gospel of John (John 11:1–44) in the New Testament, as well as in the Secret Gospel of Mark (a fragment of an extended version of the Gospel of Mark) in which Jesus raises Lazarus of Bethany from the dead four days after his entombment. The event is said to have taken place at Bethany. In John, this is the last of the miracles that Jesus performs before the passion, crucifixion and his own resurrection.In literature
In the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, after writing his will and testament for the fourth time, Ishmael remarks that, "all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be."In Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment the protagonist Raskolnikov asks his lover Sonia to read him this section of the Gospel.In two short stories written by Mark Twain and posthumously published in 1972, a lawyer argues that Lazarus' heirs had an indisputable claim to any property the resurrected Lazarus had owned before his death.Playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1925 wrote the play Lazarus Laughed, his largest-cast play, presenting Lazarus' life after his resurrection.  The play has only been produced once in full, though in reduced-cast versions at other times.  
Many works of literature from the 20th century allude to Lazarus, including Truman Capote's short story "A Tree of Night" in A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1945) and John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace (1959). Allusions in 20th-century poetry occur in works such as Leonid Andreyev's book-length poem Lazarus (1906), T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Lazarus" (1920), and Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" published in her posthumous anthology Ariel (1965).  An allusion to Lazarus also appears in the memoir Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers (who acknowledged the influence of Dostoevsky's works), which opens its first chapter, "In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return."Science fiction allusions to Lazarus occur in Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long novels (1941–1987), Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), and Frank Herbert's The Lazarus Effect (1983).
In the 2010 book The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy written by American professors of philosophy Kathleen Higgins and Robert C. Solomon, at the end of Chapter 5, The Search for Truth, readers are asked to consider: "Could a scientist give an adequate account of the biblical story of the raising of Lazarus?"Lazarus Is Dead (2011) by Richard Beard is an innovative novel. Its amplifies a detail of the Gospel: Lazarus was Jesus's friend; however Jesus has disciples, but not many friends. Beard traces the story back to Jesus and Lazarus's childhood in Nazareth, after, the two friends' paths have diverged. The novel was described by the Sunday Business Post as "no ordinary novel: it is a brilliant, genre-bending retelling and subversion of one of the oldest, most sensational stories in the western canon."
John Derhak's The Bones of Lazarus (2012), is a darkly funny, fast-paced, supernatural thriller that traces intersecting lives on a war-torn, resource rich, Caribbean island. The plot revolves around the premise that Lazarus of Bethany, upon his resurrection by Christ, becomes an immortal creature of Judgment, seeking the hearts and souls of the wicked throughout time.
Larry: A Novel of Church Recovery (2019) by Brian L. Boley is a short novel, in which a character named "Larry" appears. "Larry" gives suggestions to a pair of pastors about improving their churches and leading them to growth. But as we read along, we begin to understand that "Larry" may actually be the biblical Lazarus of Bethany, an immortal evangelistic servant of Jesus.
Richard Zimler's bestselling novel The Gospel According to Lazarus (2019 in English) is written from the perspective of Lazarus himself. The book presents Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus' Hebrew name) as an early Jewish mystic and explores the deep friendship between Lazarus and Yeshua, who - within the fictional setting - have been best friends since childhood.The themes of the book include how we cope with a loss of faith, the terrible sacrifices we make for those we love, the transcendent meaning of Yeshua's mission, and how we go on after suffering a shattering trauma. The Observer review summarized the novel as "A very human tale of rivalry, betrayal, power-grabbing and sacrifice.... Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this brave and engaging novel...is that Zimler manages to make the best-known narrative in western culture a page-turner."