Nicodemus the Righteous

The ruler who came by night

Nicodemus is introduced in John's Gospel as "a man of the Pharisees, a ruler of the Jews" (John 3:1) — that is, a member of the Sanhedrin and a teacher of the Law; Jesus addresses him as "the teacher of Israel" (John 3:10), the definite article suggesting a man of standing among the rabbinic authorities of Jerusalem. He came to Jesus by night, a detail the Evangelist repeats every time he names him, and which the Fathers read in two ways at once: as prudence in a man with much to lose, and as the darkness out of which every soul comes to the Light.

The conversation that followed is one of the great discourses of the Fourth Gospel. Nicodemus began with a courteous confession — "we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these signs except God be with him" — and was answered with a demand that overturned him: "except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." His literal-minded objection, how can a man be born when he is old?, drew out the teaching on baptismal regeneration — "born of water and of the Spirit" — the wind that blows where it wills, the Son of Man lifted up as Moses lifted the serpent, and the verse that has carried more of the Gospel to more people than any other, "God so loved the world" (John 3:1–21). The Church reads this passage at the Vigil of Pentecost and in the Paschal season, and Nicodemus is thus the interlocutor through whom the Church's own baptismal theology is delivered.

The defender in the council

He is heard from again when the temple officers return empty-handed and the chief priests rage that the crowd is deceived. Nicodemus — the Evangelist reminds us pointedly that he was "he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them" — asks: "Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?" (John 7:50–51). It is a lawyer's intervention, cautious and procedural, and it is brushed aside with a sneer about Galilee; but it is the only voice raised for Christ in the Sanhedrin that the Gospels record before the Passion.

The burial of the Lord

On the evening of Great Friday the caution ends. Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate and begged the body; and "there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight" (John 19:39). The quantity is royal — the spices of a king's burial — and the act was made in full public view, at the moment when the apostles had scattered and when to touch the body of a man crucified for sedition was to declare oneself. Together the two took the Lord down from the Cross, wound the body in clean linen with the spices, and laid it in the new tomb in the garden. From this the Church names them among the myrrhbearers, and the Byzantine rite sings of "the noble Joseph" and Nicodemus in the same breath on Great Friday and on the third Sunday of Pascha.

After the Resurrection

Beyond the Gospel the record is traditional. Nicodemus is said to have been baptised by the Apostles Peter and John, and, when this became known, to have been stripped of his rank, expelled from the Sanhedrin and driven out of Jerusalem, his goods confiscated. The teacher Gamaliel — his kinsman by some accounts, his colleague in the council by all — took him into his country estate at Kaphar Gamala outside the city, where Nicodemus lived out his days in poverty and prayer and died; and Gamaliel buried him there, in the same tomb in which he had earlier laid the body of the Protomartyr Stephen, and in which he and his son Abibas would afterwards be laid themselves.

The apocryphal Acts of Pilate circulated from an early date under the title the Gospel of Nicodemus, on the strength of his presence at the trial and burial; the attribution is conventional and no one now supposes he wrote it, but it preserves the sense of the early Church that Nicodemus was the insider whose testimony reached into Pilate's court.

The finding of the relics, 415

In the year 415 a priest of Kaphar Gamala named Lucian received in a vision, three times repeated, an aged man in white who named himself Gamaliel and showed him the place where four bodies lay: the Protomartyr Stephen, Nicodemus, Gamaliel himself, and Gamaliel's son Abibas. The tomb was opened in the presence of Bishop John of Jerusalem with Eutonius of Sebaste and Eleutherius of Jericho, and the relics — identified, the account says, by inscribed tablets — were carried in procession to Jerusalem. The Church keeps the finding on August 2, together with the translation of Stephen's relics to Constantinople; the uncovering itself is also commemorated on September 15.