On this interpretation, Lazarus is saved, while the rich man is damned. ![]() Interpreters down through the ages have understood that, in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich man, Jesus is contrasting the two fundamental fates that await us in the afterlife: salvation and damnation. In this parable, there are different points being made with Lazarus and the rich man, with Abraham representing as an arbiter who serves as the voice of God’s will (just as the father expresses God’s attitude in the Prodigal Son). In the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, there are different points made with the prodigal son, his older brother, and his father. There may be more than one point, and these can be identified by looking at the different characters in the parable. One needs to take a step back from the detail of the text and ask, “What is the fundamental point that Jesus is making here?” Is the biblical author trying to tell us that the sun moves rather than the earth? Is he trying to tell us about a meteor shower, as opposed to something else (the fall of angels? the fall of princes?)? One of the best checks on the tendency to inappropriately press the details in a passage is to stop and ask what the biblical author is trying to tell us–what’s his overall point? Something similar can happen with symbolic texts, as when people see stars falling from the sky in prophetic passages and think “meteor shower.” One of the dangers modern interpreters can fall into is pressing the details of a biblical passage into telling us things they aren’t meant to–like when geocentrists take references to the sun rising as if they were meant to be lessons about the physical structure of the cosmos and the absolute (rather than relative) motion of objects within it. However that may be, Jesus told this for a purpose, and it wasn’t simply to tell us about a particular incident. Second, in the parable, the proposal that Lazarus be sent back from the dead is seemingly refused (Luke 16:27-31), which is the opposite of what happened to the historical Lazarus. Instead, we have him living with his two sisters, and they apparently had considerable financial resources, since John identifies Lazarus’s sister Mary as the woman who broke the bottle of (very!) costly ointment over Jesus’ head (John 12:1-3). I think it’s possible that the narrative is in some way based on the experience of the historical Lazarus, though it is probably in some degree a parable.įirst, we don’t have an indication that the historical Lazarus was a beggar, especially not the kind described in the parable. ![]() It’s also striking that, in the course of the parable, it is proposed that Lazarus come back from the dead, which the historical Lazarus actually did (John 11).įurther, Luke knows the Bethany family to which Lazarus belonged, as he mentions Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42).Īll of these factors have led some to question the extent to which this story even is a parable–as opposed to a straightforward account of what happened to Lazarus in the afterlife. ![]() (It also mentions Abraham by name, but he can be seen as belonging to a different category as an archtypical figure from Israel’s history). This parable is unique in that it is the only one of Jesus’ parables that involves a named figure–Lazarus. In Luke 16:19-31, Jesus tells the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man and their respective fates in the afterlife.
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