Who Was Nicodemus in the Bible? The Pharisee Who Came by Night

Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a leader on the council in Jerusalem who came to Jesus by night, and that night he heard Jesus say, “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7). Only John’s Gospel tells us about him, and it gives him three scenes: the visit by night, a word for Jesus before the council, and the burial of Jesus.

The scenes are short, but across them we watch a man change. Augustine, preaching on John, said that he “came to the Lord, and came by night; came to the Light, and came in the darkness,” and the last time we see Nicodemus he is carrying spices to bury the one he first visited in the dark.

All three passages are in the Gospel of John:

Passage	When	What Nicodemus does
John 3:1–21	Early in Jesus’ ministry, at Passover	Visits Jesus by night and asks how a man can be born again
John 7:45–52	The Feast of Tabernacles	Asks the council to hear Jesus before judging him
John 19:38–42	The day Jesus died	Brings myrrh and aloes and helps bury him

Whenever Nicodemus comes back into the story, John reminds us who he is. In chapter 7 he is “he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,” and at the cross he is “Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night” (John 7:50; 19:39). John never lets us forget the night he first came, or that he kept coming back.

Nicodemus was a man of standing among his people. John calls him “a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews” (John 3:1), and Jesus calls him “a master of Israel” (John 3:10), a teacher of the nation. The Catholic Encyclopedia reads John 7:50 as showing that he sat in the Sanhedrin, the council that would later hand Jesus to Pilate, and Thayer’s Greek lexicon calls him “a member of the Sanhedrin who took the part of Jesus.” To judge by the hundred pounds of spices he brought to the tomb, he was a man of means as well.

His name is Greek, Nikodemos, made from nike, victory, and demos, the people, and Strong’s reads it as “victorious among his people.” Jews of that age sometimes bore Greek names. Josephus mentions a Nicodemus sent as an envoy to Pompey, and a Hebrew form, Naqdimon, is found in the Talmud, but no source shows that either of them is the Nicodemus we meet in John.

John never tells us why he came at night, and we should not pretend to know. What we do know is that he came with a confession already on his lips: “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him” (John 3:2). That is more than most of the council would say aloud, and John tells us later that “among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue” (John 12:42). Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus’s companion at the end, was a disciple “secretly for fear of the Jews” (John 19:38), that is, of his fellow leaders, for Joseph and Nicodemus were Jews themselves. It may well have been fear that brought Nicodemus out after dark.

John hears something more in the hour, too. His Gospel opens with a light that “shineth in darkness” (John 1:5), and the conversation with Nicodemus ends on the same note: “light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19). So a cautious man came through the dark to the Light of the world, and Jesus did not send him away for coming at night. He stayed with him and told him some of the deepest things in all the Gospels.

“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). The Greek word for “again,” anothen, also means “from above.” Nicodemus heard only the first meaning and asked the plain question: “How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” (John 3:4). Jesus answered with the second: “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:5–6).

This new birth is God’s work, and it is as free as the wind: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The teacher of Israel could only ask, “How can these things be?” (John 3:9), and Jesus showed him where the new birth would come from: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). And in the same passage come the words “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

Christians have read “water and the Spirit” in different ways. Catholic teaching sees baptism in the words, and the Catechism says baptism “signifies and actually brings about the birth of water and the Spirit” without which no one can enter the kingdom. The Southern Baptist confession calls the new birth “a change of heart wrought by the Holy Spirit through conviction of sin,” which a person answers with repentance and faith, and it treats baptism as the believer’s “act of obedience” that follows. Both teach that this birth is God’s work. There is more in What does it mean to be a born again Christian?

Later, at the Feast of Tabernacles, the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest Jesus, and the officers came back empty-handed, saying, “Never man spake like this man” (John 7:46). The Pharisees turned on them and on the crowd that followed Jesus: “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed” (John 7:48–49).

Then Nicodemus, one of their own, asked them a single question: “Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?” (John 7:51). He was asking about the law and confessed no faith, but in that company the question was enough to bring scorn on him: “Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet” (John 7:52). The man who had once come by night was speaking up among his own, and asking them to give Jesus a hearing.

After Jesus died, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body, “And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight” (John 19:39). The pound John means is the Roman litra, about twelve ounces or 327.5 grams, so the spices weighed some 33 kilograms, or about 72 of our pounds. Not long before, Mary of Bethany had anointed Jesus’ feet with “a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly” (John 12:3), and its scent filled the house. Nicodemus brought a hundred times as much.

“Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury,” John writes, and the two men laid him in a new tomb in a garden near the cross (John 19:40–42). By then most of the disciples had fled. The Pharisee who had once come under cover of dark now handled the body of a man Rome had crucified, and laid it to rest before the Sabbath fell.

The Bible never says in so many words that he believed, and it never tells us what became of him. But his three scenes all move the same way: he comes as an inquirer, speaks up as a defender, and ends as a mourner who honours Jesus at great cost. The Catholic Encyclopedia judges that “he embraced the truth as soon as it was fully made known to him,” and the Catholic Church honours him as a saint: the Roman Martyrology keeps 3 August for the finding of his relics with those of St Stephen, Gamaliel and Abibo.

Augustine saw in him a catechumen, one who believes in Christ’s name but has not yet come all the way. We may find ourselves in him too, for faith often begins with a question asked in private and grows by small, costly steps. Where he went at the end is a question taken up in Nicodemus’s Eternal Destination: Did He Go to Heaven?

The Gospel of Nicodemus is a later book and not part of the Bible. Its older title is the Acts of Pilate. It claims to come from official records, with a Hebrew original attributed to Nicodemus, and “the title ‘Gospel of Nicodemus’ is of medieval origin.” Justin Martyr, writing to the emperor Antoninus Pius in the second century, already told his readers they could learn of Jesus’ death “from the Acts of Pontius Pilate.” But the book we have is a later one, and the Catholic Encyclopedia dates it, in its present form, to the middle of the fourth century. It tells of Jesus’ trial, drawn from Luke 23, and of the resurrection, and an added section describes Christ’s descent among the dead. It was widely read in the Middle Ages and shaped many legends of the Passion, but no church counts it as Scripture.

What we truly know of Nicodemus is much shorter: three scenes in John, in which a man moves from the night toward the light. The words he heard that first night fit him well: “But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God” (John 3:21).

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• Biblical History: Who were The Pharisees?
• 16 Bible Verses About Being Born Again
• Pharisees vs Sadducees: What Was the Difference? Resurrection, Tradition and the Temple
• What were the seven last words of Jesus Christ on the cross?