Lazarus, Margdalene, and Martha after the death of Jesus -A C Emmerich

 

Three or four years after the death of Christ, the Jews arrested Lazarus, Martha, and Mary Magdalene. They also arrested the disciple Maximin, as well as the man born blind who had been healed by Jesus, whose name was Chelitonius, and two maidens. They placed them on a dismantled ship, with neither oars nor sails, abandoning them to the mercy of the waves. 

 

By a miracle of God, they escaped shipwreck. With the Lord's help, the vessel was carried across the sea at extraordinary speed and came to rest on the coast of southern France, near the city of Massilia, today known as Marseille. When they arrived in this city, bacchanal festivals for local idols were being celebrated. The seven foreigners sat under a colonnade in an open area. They remained there for a long time, hesitant. Martha was the first who, after being refreshed by what they brought in their small containers, mingled with the local people who had approached them and explained how they had arrived there. 

 

She also spoke to them about Jesus, filled with great emotion. I also saw how later people threw stones at them to drive them away; however, the stones did not harm them, and they remained in that spot until the following morning. The others had also begun to speak and make themselves understood, thereby winning the goodwill of several people. The next day, people arrived from a large building, which I take to be the town hall, and asked them many questions. They spent another day under the arcades, interacting with passersby who stopped to observe the strangers. On the third day, they were brought to the large house before the leader, separated into two groups. The men remained there with the leader, while the women were taken to another house in the city. They were treated well and given food. 

 

I saw that they preached and taught in the places to which they were taken, and that the local leader issued an order across the city not to disturb the foreigners. Soon, many inhabitants allowed themselves to be baptized. Lazarus baptized in a large fountain in the square in front of the temple, which gradually became deserted. I believe the leader was also baptized. They did not stay together for long. Later, Lazarus continued preaching there as Bishop. Martha set off with the two maidens to a wild, rocky region near the city of Aix, inhabited by many pagan slave women whom she converted. Later, a convent and a church were built there. In that region, along the bank of a river, lived a monster that caused great destruction in the countryside. Martha arrived just as the beast was devouring a man. Martha subdued the monster by placing a belt around its neck in the name of Jesus and choked it, while the people who witnessed the scene finished it off. 

 

Martha often preached the Gospel before large crowds in open spaces and along the riverbank. She and her companions used to build a kind of pulpit out of stacked stones. They arranged them to form steps, leaving the interior hollow like a vault, and placed a thick stone on top from which she preached standing up. She did this so skilfully that even a mason could not have done better; I have always seen her as ingenious and extraordinarily orderly. 

 

One day, while Martha was preaching from this elevated spot on the riverbank, a young man wanted to swim across from the opposite bank to hear what she was saying; but the current overcame him, and the unfortunate youth drowned. Because of this, the people were displeased with the saint and blamed her, pointing out that she had surrounded herself only with slave women whom she had managed to convert. When the father found the body of his drowned son the following day, he brought it before Martha in the presence of the people, declaring that he would only believe in Christ and in the God she proclaimed if she restored his son to life. Martha then commanded the young man, in the name of Jesus, to return to life, and he was resurrected. The resurrected youth, his father, and many others became Christians, while others were not converted and considered Martha a sorceress. 

 

 I saw that one of her traveling companions, who I believe was the disciple Maximin, arrived in the region to visit Martha and gave her Holy Communion. Martha worked, taught, and converted many inhabitants of the region. When Mary Magdalene separated from them, she retired to a solitary region where she lived alone in a cave that she prepared as a dwelling. Maximin would occasionally approach halfway to give her Holy Communion. Mary Magdalene died shortly before her sister and was buried in Martha's convent. Over the cave where she had lived, Maximin built a chapel.