Who was Nicodemus?

A teacher who came by night

John introduces him with three tags: a party, a name and a rank.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night

A “ruler” here means a member of the council, the Sanhedrin. His name is Greek, “victory of the people,” not unusual in a Jerusalem family of standing. He opens in the plural, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,” as if others on the council were curious too. Jesus answers him as one teacher to another: “Are you the teacher of Israel, and don’t understand these things?” (John 3:10).

Why at night? John never says. Caution fits a later line: many of the rulers believed in Jesus, John writes, but kept quiet “so that they wouldn’t be put out of the synagogue” (John 12:42). So does John’s love of light and darkness, which runs through the same chapter (John 3:19–21). The conversation itself, the riddle of being born again and the verse that comes out of it, is told in What does John 3:16 say?

A fair hearing

He appears again at the Feast of Booths. Temple officers sent to arrest Jesus come back without him, and the council members are furious: has any of the rulers believed in him? One of them speaks up.

Nicodemus (he who came to him by night, being one of them) said to them, “Does our law judge a man unless it first hears from him personally and knows what he does?”

It is a lawyer’s point, not a confession, and it costs him. “Are you also from Galilee?” the others sneer, adding that no prophet comes from there (John 7:52). In their eyes only a provincial could take this Galilean seriously.

A burial fit for a king

His last appearance is his boldest. On the afternoon of the crucifixion Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple, asks Pilate for the body, and Nicodemus comes with him.

Nicodemus, who at first came to Jesus by night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred Roman pounds.

That is roughly 33 kilograms (73 pounds), an amount for royalty. The two men wrap the body in linen with the spices and lay it in a new tomb in a garden nearby. A council member handling the corpse of a man Rome had just executed, in the open, the day before the Sabbath: John never says what Nicodemus believed. He shows what he did.

What tradition added

• A gospel. The Gospel of Nicodemus, a fourth-century reworking of the Acts of Pilate, makes him a witness at Pilate’s trial and tells of Christ’s descent among the dead.
• Relics. In 415 a priest named Lucian reported a dream that led to graves near Jerusalem said to hold Stephen, Gamaliel and Nicodemus.
• A feast. The Orthodox honor him on the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, the third Sunday of Easter; the Roman Martyrology lists him on August 31, with Joseph of Arimathea.
• A label. In 1544 John Calvin attacked French Protestants who hid their faith behind Catholic practice as “Nicodemites,” and the word still means a secret believer.
• A face. In the Florentine Pietà, carved between 1547 and 1555, Michelangelo gave the hooded old man holding Christ, usually taken for Nicodemus, his own features.

The Talmud also remembers a rich Jerusalemite named Nakdimon ben Gurion in the years before AD 70 (Taanit 19b–20a). A few scholars identify the two men; most doubt it.