Certainly his image has been co-opted by gothic and horror discourse. A reanimated corpse with all its transgression of boundaries – life/death, human/inhuman, the real/ the supernatural – seems typically gothic. If we were to search for a gothic Lazarus, it would be tempting to stop here.
It’s this scene that is the source of the verse, ‘Jesus wept’ the shortest, and possibly most well-known, Bible verse. It was a scene sound-tracked by distraught weeping and mocking laughter turned to astonishment. The most well-known of these is the Lazarus who four-days dead, wrapped in his grave clothes and smelling of decay, was raised to life by the son of the living God. In the four gospels of the Christian New Testament, there are accounts of two different men called Lazarus. Vincent Van Gogh – The Raising of Lazarus
#Lazarus resurrection animation series#
This blog series will look at one particular biblical story and character – Lazarus – and investigate the recurrence of this motif and the influence of this biblical tale on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843) and A Beleaguered City by Margaret Oliphant (1880). However, to understand the intentions of many gothic texts and the issues they are exploring, we must root out these biblical references and decipher their role and function. A modern lack of belief in these symbols or ideas can downplay their importance in the narrative as can the simple ‘blindness’ of biblical ‘illiteracy’. It is all too easy for critics in this modern milieu to underestimate or ignore the pivotal importance of Christian thought and biblical imagery to the past writers of the gothic. Biblical literacy, by which I mean familiarity with the texts, stories and ideas in the Bible, was inevitably far higher than in our modern pluralistic and predominantly secular society. Some writers of the gothic were assuredly not Christian believers but they lived in a society saturated by the religious imagery and thought of the Protestant church. This is hardly surprising, given the context in which it was produced – that of declaredly Christian societies in which the Protestant Church continued to play an important role in both the public and private lives of the nation (whether by choice or tradition).
#Lazarus resurrection animation full#
The British gothic, particularly in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, is full of biblical imagery and engagement with biblical texts. (I like to think my work has become more nuanced… see what you think!) The jump in footnotes is an image which is no longer available. You can see the start of my work on the Gothic and theology here. As the original site has disappeared, I am republishing (without amendment) some of my earliest academic work! This is a three part blog series and I’ll be releasing one a week.
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