Nicodemus

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It happens at night, and the cover of dark is the first thing the Gospel tells us. The visitor is no curious bystander: he is a Pharisee and a member of the ruling council, a leader of his people, addressed in the very dialogue as the teacher of Israel — and he comes to Jesus when no one will see him, opening with the careful plural of a delegation: we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one could do these signs apart from God. The hour is the first thing John records about Nicodemus, and the Gospel will not let it go. He came by night. Everything the scene means is folded into that detail.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, “Nicodemus Visiting Jesus” (1899), a nocturnal treatment of the night visit — Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Nicodemus belongs to the Gospel of John alone — no other gospel and no source outside Christian writing names him — and he appears in it exactly three times. Each time he is a little further into the light, and the arc traced by the three is the whole of his portrait: the man who arrives in darkness ends, unhidden, at the tomb in daylight.

The night dialogue

The opening exchange turns on a single word, and the word will not hold still. Jesus answers the courteous approach with a hard saying: no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born anōthen. The Greek adverb means two things at once. It means again — a second time, over from the start — and it means from above, out of a higher origin. The dialogue is engineered on the gap between the two. Nicodemus hears only the lower sense, the temporal one, and recoils into literalism: how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born? The teacher of Israel, master of the text, is undone by a figure of speech. He takes the image for an absurdity because he has heard again where the other meaning, from above, was the one that mattered.

That is not a flaw in the writing; it is the writing’s method. John builds his dialogues out of misunderstanding — a word with a surface and a depth, a listener who stops at the surface, a reader invited to fall through. Jesus presses the point with a second figure: one must be born of water and Spirit, and the wind blows where it wills, you hear its sound but cannot say whence it comes or whither it goes — so is everyone born of the Spirit. The same pun runs underneath: pneuma is at once wind and breath and Spirit, the invisible mover known only by its effects. Nicodemus, who came reasoning from signs to their author, is asked to accept a birth he cannot witness, from a source he cannot place. His last words in the scene are a question that goes unanswered in his own mouth: how can these things be? The discourse continues past him and turns into the Gospel’s own voice — the lifting up of the Son, the love of God for the world, the verdict that light has come and men preferred the dark because their deeds were evil. The frame closes where it opened. The man who walked in by night is left standing inside a meditation on night.

The whole exchange depends on the logos of the Gospel — on language carrying more than its speaker intends — and it has fed centuries of reflection on what the second birth is. The misunderstanding is doctrinally productive: it forces the distinction between a natural birth and a birth that is gift, between renovation and origination. Later Christian thought tied the saying firmly to baptism — born of water and the Spirit — and the night-words born again / born from above became one of the most quoted lines in the New Testament, their double sense usually flattened in translation to the first meaning, the one Nicodemus heard.

Matthias Stom, “Christ and Nicodemus” (c. 1640-1650), the night dialogue lit by a single hidden flame — Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The council

He returns in the seventh chapter, and the setting could not be more different: not a private night but the council in session, the chief priests and Pharisees furious that the temple guard has come back without making an arrest. Nicodemus speaks — identified, pointedly, as the one who had gone to Jesus before, and as one of their own number. His intervention is narrow and procedural. Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does? It is not a confession; it is a lawyer’s caution, the minimum a just process requires. And it is dismissed with a sneer that doubles as a slur on his loyalty: are you also from Galilee? Search and see that no prophet rises out of Galilee. He raises a point of order and is told, in effect, to choose a side. He says nothing more in that room.

The scene is small but it moves the arc forward. The man who came in the dark now speaks in the daylight of the assembly, in front of the very colleagues he had once avoided. He speaks for the form of justice rather than for the man, and he is shouted down — but he has been seen, and the seeing costs him. He stands, for an instant, between his office and his half-formed conviction, and does not retreat from either.

The burial

The third appearance is wordless and decisive. After the crucifixion, when the council’s verdict has run its course, two members of that council claim the body. Joseph of Arimathea, named here as a secret disciple “for fear of the Jews,” asks Pilate for it; and Nicodemus, the man who first came by night, comes with him — now in the open, in the failing light of the eve of the Sabbath — bearing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred litrai, a hundred Roman pounds. The figure is enormous, the quantity of a royal funeral, some sixty-five or more pounds by modern weight: spice for a king. They wind the body in linen with the spices, in the manner of a Judean burial, and lay it in the new tomb in the garden.

There are no words assigned to him here, and none are needed. The man whose first scene was a stalled conversation about being born again ends his story preparing a corpse for the grave — and the lavishness of the spices is the speech he does not make. The one who came hidden, by night, now does the most exposed thing available to a councillor: he handles the body of a man his own court has condemned, in daylight, on a feast eve, before whoever cares to watch. The dark-to-daylight movement is complete. John never reports what became of him; the burial is the last the Gospel says.

Titian, “The Entombment of Christ” (c. 1520), with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea bearing the body — Musée du Louvre, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The historicity problem

How much of this rests on a remembered man is among the harder questions in study of the Fourth Gospel, and the registers must be kept apart. On the documentary side: Nicodemus is unattested outside John. The Synoptic gospels, which know a Joseph of Arimathea at the burial, do not know a Nicodemus; no non-Christian writer names him; nothing anchors him to the wider record.

That silence, joined to how perfectly he serves John’s design, has led many critical readers to treat him less as a person than as a figure — the representative of a type. He is the sympathetic insider whose belief is real but partial, the man of the establishment drawn toward the light yet caught at its threshold, the embodiment of a faith that comes by night. On this reading the very name suits the part: Nikodēmos, “victory of the people,” a stock Greek name, fitting for a notable of the people who half-comes-over. The wordplay that drives his scene cuts the same way: anōthen puns only in Greek. A conversation conducted in the Aramaic of first-century Judea could not turn on again versus from above, which tells against the dialogue being a transcript and for its being a composition — a scene built in Greek, for readers of Greek, to do theological work.

Against the dissolving of Nicodemus into a symbol stands an argument from the grain of the text. A gospel that wages sustained polemic against “the Jews” — its shorthand for the hostile authorities — had little motive to invent a Pharisee and councillor who defends Jesus before his peers and buries him with honor. A sympathetic member of the very class the Gospel opposes is the kind of detail a writer is more likely to have received than to have manufactured; the awkwardness argues for memory. The honest position holds both at once: a figure so exactly fitted to the Gospel’s purposes that his historicity cannot be demonstrated, and so cross-grained to its polemic that it cannot be dismissed.

One proposal would give him an address in the record. Rabbinic tradition remembers a fabulously wealthy Jerusalem aristocrat, Naqdimon ben Gurion, celebrated for his philanthropy and ruined in the catastrophe of 70 CE, and the Gurion family is known to Josephus. Richard Bauckham, in Nicodemus and the Gurion Family (Journal of Theological Studies 47/1, 1996), surveyed every occurrence of the name across the rabbinic corpus and Josephus, concluded they point to a single prominent Jerusalem family, and argued that John’s Nicodemus belongs to it. The identification has not won general assent. It rests largely on the shared name, and the chronology strains: a Nicodemus old enough to be teacher of Israel around 30 CE would be very old indeed by the siege in which Naqdimon flourished and fell. The proposal remains a possibility resting on a name, no more.

The second Nicodemus

A second figure carries the name into a literature John never imagined. The Gospel of Nicodemus, also called the Acts of Pilate, is an apocryphal work composed long after the events it narrates — the surviving text in its full form belongs to roughly the early fifth century, though it gathers older material — and is pseudonymously ascribed to Nicodemus as eyewitness. No serious reader has held that the councillor wrote it; the name is a guarantor of authenticity attached to the front of a much later book. The early appeal to “the Acts of Pontius Pilate” made by the second-century apologist Justin Martyr points to the prestige of such a document, but not necessarily to this one.

The work falls in two unequal parts. The first, the Acts of Pilate proper, expands the trial and passion into a circumstantial courtroom drama, complete with witnesses, debate over the Law, and miraculous signs in Pilate’s hall. The second part — added later still, absent from the earliest Greek recension and fullest in the Latin versions — is the Descensus Christi ad Inferos, the Descent of Christ into Hell. It is the most influential early narrative of an event the canonical texts only gesture at: in the interval between the crucifixion and the resurrection, Christ goes down into the realm of the dead, shatters its bronze gates, binds the power that rules there, and leads out the righteous of the ages — the patriarchs, the prophets, Adam first among them — who have waited in the dark for a deliverer.

The Anastasis fresco (c. 1315-1321) in the Chora Church, Istanbul: Christ hauls Adam and Eve up by the wrist over the shattered gates of hell — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

This descent — the Harrowing of Hell — entered Christian imagination chiefly through the book bearing Nicodemus’s name. Read across the Middle Ages in Greek and Latin and the vernaculars, it furnished the scene to the mystery plays, where the breaking of hell’s gates became a staple of the cycle dramas; it shaped the iconography of the Anastasis, Christ hauling Adam and Eve up by the wrist; it stands behind the descent in Piers Plowman and colors Dante’s underworld. The image of the shattered gate and the freed dead — light forcing its way into the deepest dark — is, in its outline, the same figure that governed the night-dialogue, now thrown across the whole architecture of the afterlife. The book attached its drama of broken darkness to the one Gospel character whose own scene had moved from night toward day.

In study

The standard gateway to the apocryphal text is its scholarly anthology and the critical apparatus around it. Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše’s The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 419-489, prints the Gospel of Nicodemus with text and translation, and Ehrman’s Lost Christianities (Oxford, 2003) sets the Descent narrative in the broader contest of early Christian writings; Ehrman credits the work with the most influential early telling of Christ’s descent. The most detailed scholarly mapping of the apocryphon — its Greek recensions A and B, edited in the nineteenth century by Constantin von Tischendorf, and the Latin tradition that carries the Descensus — is the NASSCAL e-Clavis entry on the Acts of Pilate, which tracks recension, dating, and reception; an accessible introduction with texts is collected at Early Christian Writings. On the historical question, Richard Bauckham’s Journal of Theological Studies article remains the fullest case for an identification with the Gurion family, and the standard Johannine commentaries — Raymond Brown’s and Rudolf Schnackenburg’s among them — treat the night-dialogue and the anōthen pun as the test case for how John makes meaning out of misunderstanding.

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.

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