Nicodemus

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Nicodemus is a figure in the Gospel of John: a Pharisee and member of the Jewish ruling council who comes to Jesus under cover of darkness, is told that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again, and does not understand. The Greek phrase John puts in Jesus’s mouth carries a deliberate double sense — gennēthē anōthen, born “again” or born “from above” — and the whole exchange turns on Nicodemus hearing only the first meaning. He asks how a grown man can re-enter his mother’s womb. The misunderstanding is the point; the scene is built to let the reader catch what the character cannot.

He appears three times, and only in John. After the night conversation, he speaks once before the council, urging that the law not condemn a man before hearing him — a cautious procedural objection, quickly dismissed by the others. At the end he returns openly, bringing a costly weight of myrrh and aloes to help Joseph of Arimathea bury the crucified Jesus. Read in sequence, the three appearances trace a movement out of the dark: the man who came by night ends at the tomb in daylight. Whether John intended that arc as biography or as a teaching device is exactly the kind of question the text leaves open.

Historically little can be said with confidence. The other gospels do not mention him; there is no record of him outside Christian writings; and the scene’s careful symbolic patterning has led many scholars to read him less as a remembered individual than as a representative type — the sympathetic insider who half-believes. A rabbinic figure named Naqdimon ben Gurion is sometimes proposed as a connection, but the identification rests on the name alone and is not generally accepted.

A second Nicodemus belongs to later tradition. The Gospel of Nicodemus, also called the Acts of Pilate, is an apocryphal narrative composed centuries after the New Testament and ascribed to him. It supplies a detailed account of the trial before Pilate and, in its second part, the most influential early telling of the Descent into Hell — Christ breaking the gates of the underworld to free the righteous dead. The text was widely read through the Middle Ages and shaped the medieval drama of the Harrowing of Hell, though no serious reader has held that Nicodemus wrote it.

What the figure carries, across both layers, is the theme of a second birth not understood at first hearing — the turn from a knowing of the surface to a knowing meant to remake the one who holds it. That the night-dialogue’s key word can mean both “again” and “from above” has kept it alive in Christian thought as a small emblem of how such recognition is supposed to work: not information added, but a starting over.

→ Related: Gnosis