The Tomb of Lazarus is a rock-cut burial chamber on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, in the village of Bethany — the modern Arabic name al-Eizariya meaning "the place of Lazarus" and preserving the identification linguistically across the centuries. The tomb is reached today by a descent of twenty-four steps cut through the bedrock to a small antechamber and a lower burial chamber roughly ten feet below ground level. The stairway is medieval, cut during the Crusader and Mamluk periods to allow pilgrim access after the upper structures had risen above the original ground level; the burial chamber itself is the original first-century rock-cutting. John 11 records that Lazarus had been four days in the tomb when Jesus arrived, that the tomb was "a cave, and a stone lay against it," and that Jesus called "Lazarus, come out!" and the dead man came out "his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth." The earliest Christian identification of the site goes back to Eusebius of Caesarea, who notes the location of Bethany and the tomb in the Onomasticon around AD 320. The pilgrim Egeria, visiting in approximately AD 384, describes a Lazarium — a church already standing over the tomb — and the liturgical procession to the site on the Saturday before Palm Sunday that became standard in the Jerusalem stational liturgy. The Crusader-era basilica that followed the Byzantine church was destroyed; a Franciscan church now stands beside the tomb, and a separate mosque, al-Uzair, occupies the site of the original church directly above. Site identification has been continuous since the fourth century AD — earlier than any other Holy Land site outside the Gospels' core Jerusalem locations. The tomb is currently a shared pilgrimage site for Christian and Muslim visitors, with separate access maintained through the two adjoining religious complexes. Sources: Eusebius of Caesarea, Onomasticon (c. AD 320), edition by R. Steven Notley and Ze'ev Safrai (Brill, 2005); Egeria, Itinerarium (c. AD 384), translation by John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels (Aris & Phillips, 3rd edition 1999); Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide (Oxford, 5th edition 2008); Bargil Pixner, Paths of the Messiah (Ignatius, 2010); John 11:1–44.
The Bethany tomb anchors John 11's resurrection narrative to a datable, geographically stable location, with continuous identification from Eusebius's Onomasticon around AD 320 — earlier than virtually any other Gospel site outside Jerusalem. The village's Arabic name al-Eizariya independently preserves the Lazarus identification across fourteen centuries of linguistic change.