Nicodemus the Pharisee

When was Nicodemus active?

Nicodemus the Pharisee is dated fl. c. AD 30 (death unrecorded) in the archive, which places Nicodemus in the Apostolic Age (AD 4–70). The dating is traditional and approximate; the archive marks it as uncertain rather than fixing a year the sources do not give.

Which early sources mention Nicodemus?

Nicodemus the Pharisee is named in 4 primary-source passages catalogued here, drawn from John and Anonymous. Every passage is quoted from a named public-domain translation, earliest first.

Where was Nicodemus from?

The archive associates Nicodemus the Pharisee with Jerusalem.

Who were Nicodemus’ contemporaries?

The archive links Nicodemus the Pharisee to 4 other figures, including Joseph of Arimathea, Pontius Pilate, Gamaliel the Elder and Jesus of Nazareth. Each connection is drawn from a source that places them together, not from inference.

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, 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. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,) Doth our law judge any man, before that it hear him, and know what he doeth? They answered and said unto him, Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.

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. 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.

[The work circulated from the mid-fourth century under Nicodemus’s name, as a reworking of the earlier Acts of Pilate; the attribution is pseudonymous and nothing in it derives from him. It is cited here for what it shows about his standing — that of the three men John places at the trial and the burial, it was Nicodemus whose name a later writer chose to borrow, on the strength of a Pharisee who had asked for a hearing and then bought a hundred pound of spices. The same text supplies the traditional names Dysmas, Gestas, Procla and Longinus, all of which this archive holds.]

The Acts of Pilate, also transmitted as the Gospel of Nicodemus — held in this library. English: Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers 8 (1886), public domain. The work is pseudonymous: it circulated under Nicodemus’s name from the mid-fourth century as a reworking of the earlier Acts of Pilate, and nothing in it is his.

Nicodemus = Naqdimon ben Gurion of the rabbinic sources

A wealthy and generous man of Jerusalem, also called Buni, whose name was explained by a miracle of the sun breaking through the clouds. For the identification: the Jewish Encyclopedia (1905) — “in all probability … identical”; F. W. Farrar — “extremely probable”; and Richard Bauckham, who found every occurrence of the name in Josephus and the rabbinic sources to belong to one Jerusalem family before AD 70. Against: Alfred Edersheim — “there can scarcely be a doubt that this somewhat legendary Naqdimon was not the Nicodemus of the Gospel” — and the chronology, since Naqdimon appears some forty years later during the war with Rome. Recorded, not adopted.

Nicodemus, baptised by Peter and John and sheltered by Gamaliel

A later tradition, reported by Farrar from the apocryphal material: that he professed himself a disciple and was baptised by Peter and John, was stripped of his office, beaten and driven from Jerusalem, was sheltered by his kinsman Gamaliel until his death, and was buried near the body of Stephen. Well outside the archive’s attestation horizon and recorded as legend.