Who are the two sisters of Lazarus?

Mary and Martha. John 11:1-2 calls Bethany "the village of Mary and her sister Martha" and identifies Mary as the woman who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair.

What Bible names start with L for a boy?

Laban and Lot come from Genesis, and Lazarus, Levi, Luke, Linus and Lucius are New Testament men, with Levi also the name of Jacob's son and Lazarus also used for the poor man in the parable of Luke 16. Lawrence, Leo and Louis come from later saints rather than from scripture.

Christian Boy Names Starting With L: Which Lazarus, and Is Levi the Apostle Matthew?

Two Gospels give the name Lazarus to two different figures. In John 11 Lazarus of Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha, dies and is called out of his tomb; in Luke 16 Lazarus is the poor man at a rich man's gate in a parable Jesus tells.

Levi works the other way round. Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27 give that name to the tax collector Jesus calls with "Follow me", and Matthew 9:9 tells the same call about a man named Matthew.

Luke, the physician of Paul's letters, follows, then Linus and Lucius from Paul's greetings, Laban and Lot from Genesis, and the saints Lawrence, Leo and Louis.

Quick Facts

One name, two figures: Lazarus of Bethany (John 11) and the poor man of the parable (Luke 16:19-25)
One call, two names: Levi in Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27; Matthew in Matthew 9:9
Named by Paul: Luke, "the beloved physician" (Colossians 4:14)
In Paul's greetings: Linus (2 Timothy 4:21) and Lucius (Romans 16:21)
Saints: Lawrence (died 258), Leo I (pope 440-461) and Louis IX (died 1270)

Lazarus of Bethany and the Lazarus of Jesus' parable

They are two different figures in two different kinds of passage. John 11:1 introduces "Lazarus of Bethany", a man who falls ill and dies, while Luke 16:20 introduces "a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores" inside a story Jesus tells.

John's account ends at a tomb, where Jesus cries "Lazarus, come out!" and the dead man walks out with his hands and feet still bound in strips of cloth (John 11:43-44).

Luke's Lazarus lies at a rich man's gate, longing for what falls from the table, and when he dies he is "carried away by the angels to be with Abraham" (Luke 16:21-22). The rich man dies too and finds himself in torment in Hades.

The two figures named Lazarus
Question	Lazarus of John 11-12	Lazarus of Luke 16:19-25
Where he is found	Bethany, the village of Mary and Martha (John 11:1)	Lying at the gate of a rich man's house (Luke 16:20)
Family named	His sisters Mary and Martha (John 11:1-2)	None
What happens to him	He dies and comes out of the tomb when Jesus calls him (John 11:43-44)	He dies and is carried by angels to Abraham (Luke 16:22)
What follows	The chief priests plan to put him to death as well (John 12:10)	Abraham tells the rich man that Lazarus is now comforted (Luke 16:25)
Kind of passage	Gospel account of an event at Bethany	A parable Jesus tells
Who else is named	Mary, Martha and the chief priests	Abraham only; the rich man is never named

The Bethany Lazarus stays in the story after he is raised. Crowds came "to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead", and the chief priests planned his death too, because on his account many were believing in Jesus (John 12:9-11).

The parable's Lazarus is defined by a reversal. Luke names the poor man and leaves the rich man unnamed, and Abraham tells the rich man that he received good things in life and Lazarus evil things, "but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony" (Luke 16:25).

Behind the Name traces the name to Lazaros, the Greek form of Eleazar used in the New Testament, of which Lazarus is the Latinized spelling. Its entry describes only the man from Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha, who was restored to life.

Nothing in John 11-12 or Luke 16 connects the two beyond the name.

Is Levi the same person as Matthew?

The Gospels tell one call scene under two names. Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27 call the tax collector Levi, Matthew 9:9 calls him Matthew, and in all three Jesus finds him "sitting at the tax-collection station" and says "Follow me".

The tax collector's call, passage by passage
Passage	Name used	Father named	What the passage adds
Mark 2:14	Levi	Alphaeus ("Levi son of Alphaeus")	He gets up and follows Jesus
Luke 5:27-29	Levi	Not named	He leaves everything, then gives "a great banquet" for Jesus in his house
Matthew 9:9	Matthew	Not named	He gets up and follows Jesus
Matthew 10:3	"Matthew the tax collector"	Not named	The trade stays in his title in the list of the Twelve

The lists of the Twelve use only one of the two names. Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15 and Acts 1:13 all give "Matthew", so Levi never appears as an apostle's name.

No passage says in so many words that Levi and Matthew are one man, so the identification rests on the matching scene. Behind the Name states it with care in two entries: Levi "might be the same person as the apostle Matthew", and Matthew was "probably also called Levi".

Mark's list of the Twelve also has a "James son of Alphaeus" (Mark 3:18), the same father's name Mark gives Levi. None of these passages says whether the two sons of Alphaeus were brothers.

The older Levi is the third son of Jacob and Leah, and Behind the Name makes him the ancestor of the priestly tribe to which Moses and Aaron belonged. It records the name as possibly meaning "joined, attached" in Hebrew.

That tribe received no territory of its own; Numbers 35:7 sets the Levites' share at forty-eight towns with their pasturelands. As an English Christian name, Levi came into use after the Protestant Reformation, according to Behind the Name.

Luke: the physician Paul names, and the books addressed to Theophilus

Colossians 4:14 sends greetings from "Luke, the beloved physician", Philemon 24 lists him with Mark, Aristarchus and Demas as "my coworkers", and 2 Timothy 4:11 says "Only Luke is with me".

None of those letters says Luke wrote anything. The tie between the third Gospel and Acts comes from the books themselves: Luke 1:3 addresses "most excellent Theophilus", and Acts 1:1 opens "In the first book, Theophilus".

Neither book names its author. According to tradition, as Behind the Name puts it, the author of both was Luke, the doctor who travelled with Paul, and the same entry calls him probably Greek by ethnicity.

The name comes from Latin Lucas and Greek Loukas, which Behind the Name takes as probably short for Loukanos, "from Lucania", a region of southern Italy. Its alternative derivation is from the Latin name Lucius.

Linus and Lucius, names from Paul's greetings

Linus appears once in the New Testament, in the greetings that close 2 Timothy: "Eubulus sends greetings to you, as do Pudens and Linus and Claudia" (2 Timothy 4:21).

Irenaeus, in Against Heresies III.3.3, says the apostles gave the office of bishop in Rome to Linus, the man "mentioned by Paul in his Epistle to Timothy". The Catholic Encyclopedia cannot say whether that identification goes back to "an ancient and reliable source, or originated later on account of the similarity of the name".

Lucius has two passages. Acts 13:1 lists "Lucius of Cyrene" among the prophets and teachers of the church at Antioch, and in Romans 16:21 a Lucius joins Timothy, Jason and Sosipater in greeting Rome as one of Paul's "fellow Israelites".

Neither passage says whether these are the same man.

Laban, whom Jacob served, and Lot, led out of Sodom

Laban is the man Jacob served for twenty years, fourteen for his daughters and six for his flock, as Jacob tells it in Genesis 31. When Jacob leaves, God warns Laban in a dream to say nothing to him, "either good or bad" (Genesis 31:24), and the two part under a covenant (Genesis 31:44).

Lot is the man the two angels bring out of Sodom. He takes the visitors into his house (Genesis 19:1-3), and at dawn, when he lingers, "the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the LORD being merciful to him" (Genesis 19:16).

Lawrence, Leo and Louis

Three L saints have dated entries in the Catholic Encyclopedia, and for Lawrence the encyclopedia separates the record of his death from the legend of how he died.

Lawrence, a deacon of the Roman Church, was martyred on 10 August 258 in the persecution of Valerian. Ambrose tells that when asked for the Church's treasures he brought forward the poor; the encyclopedia calls the red-hot gridiron a cause of "grave doubts" but has no doubt that he was a real person who was martyred.
Leo I, called the Great, was pope from 440 to 461. In 452 he met Attila at the Mincio and obtained his promise to withdraw from Italy, and Benedict XIV declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1754.
Louis IX, born at Poissy in 1215, became king of France at eleven, led crusades in 1248-1249 and 1270, and died near Tunis on 25 August 1270. Boniface VIII proclaimed his canonization at Orvieto in 1297.