Friendships resurrected

A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Feeding of the Five Thousand — in spite of their familiarity they are raced through in just a few lines. It is, however, perhaps the very terseness of the Bible that has caused at least as much ink as blood to be spilled in its cause; had it spelled the answer out, for instance, medieval scholars could never have whiled away so many jaw-droppingly fatuous hours in wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and other pressing questions.

In his new novel Richard Beard draws attention to this brevity and uses it as a springboard. He takes one of the better-known biblical tales, which appears only in the Gospel of St John, and makes leaps (of varying degrees of plausibility, though that’s exactly the point) based on the scant clues provided. We know from John that when Lazarus’s sisters approached Jesus to tell him of their brother’s illness, they referred to Lazarus as (according to the King James Version) ‘he whom thou lovest’, and the gospel’s narrator adds, two verses later, ‘Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus’. From this, Beard infers a bond begun before the two boys were born, when their parents fled from tyranny together, but which dwindled when they were in early adulthood: Lazarus went off to become a flamboyant dealer in sheep while Jesus remained to practise carpentry, and the two lost touch.