Nicodemus — From a Visitor by Night to the Man Who Brought the Myrrh

Few figures in John’s Gospel return three separate times, each appearance showing him slightly differently, the way Nicodemus does. Starting as someone who sneaks in under cover of darkness and ending up standing openly at the tomb applying spices to Jesus’s body, his arc compresses the whole shape of gradual faith that John’s Gospel traces.

Scene one: coming by night

John 3:1-2 introduces him: “Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God.’” He engages Jesus in serious theological conversation, but stumbles at the demand to be “born again,” asking, “How can someone be born when they are old?” (3:4). The conversation ends without recording Nicodemus’s response, moving instead into Jesus’s extended discourse (including 3:16, “For God so loved the world”), and the text never tells us what he decided afterward.

Raymond E. Brown, in his Anchor Bible commentary on John, argues that the “at night” setting in chapter 3 is no accident — it’s a deliberate device tied to the light-and-darkness symbolism running through the whole Gospel (1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”). Nicodemus is portrayed as someone who hasn’t yet fully stepped into the light.

Scene two: a cautious defense

In John 7:50-51, as the Pharisees and chief priests move to arrest Jesus, Nicodemus objects: “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?” He doesn’t openly support Jesus, but he raises his voice cautiously, insisting on basic legal process. The other Pharisees mock him immediately: “Are you from Galilee, too?” (7:52). D. A. Carson, in his John commentary (PNTC), reads this scene as showing Nicodemus’s faith at a midpoint — neither fully silent nor fully out in the open.

Scene three: stepping into the open

In John 19:39-40, after Jesus dies on the cross, Nicodemus, together with Joseph of Arimathea, brings “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds” to prepare Jesus’s body for burial. Craig Keener, in his extensive Gospel of John commentary, notes that this quantity — roughly seventy-five pounds — is an amount fit for a royal funeral, and reads this as the moment Nicodemus finally makes his devotion to Jesus public, at the most dangerous possible time: right after Jesus’s execution, when following him looked most perilous. The man who once came by night now shows himself in broad daylight before the Roman authorities and Jewish leaders.

A deliberate design of gradual faith

Reading all three scenes together, Carson argues that John’s Gospel uses Nicodemus to show that faith doesn’t always arrive in a single dramatic moment of decision. Nicodemus’s journey — from curious questioning (chapter 3) through cautious defense (chapter 7) to public devotion (chapter 19) — is faith that grew gradually, likely over several years. At no point in this arc does John portray Nicodemus as a failure; instead, his final act shows that this slow journey did, in the end, arrive at real faith.

A note for preachers

Nicodemus doesn’t have a dramatic conversion testimony. His story is, in fact, much closer to the actual experience of many believers — starting from doubt and questions, moving through cautious steps, and finally arriving at public commitment. This passage shows that the growth of faith doesn’t have to be instantaneous, and that a commitment reached after years of questioning and hesitation, like Nicodemus’s, is genuine faith all the same.

The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus

Nicodemus was summoned back into service in an unusually specific way in the early church. The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the Acts of Pilate), thought to have taken shape around the 4th-5th century, is a document that carries his name as its title, expanding the trial and crucifixion of Jesus into something like a detailed court record. Its second half contains the so-called descensus ad inferos — Christ’s descent into hell between his death and resurrection to free the righteous held captive there — an episode that had enormous influence on medieval theology and Easter iconography (the image of Christ breaking down hell’s gates and pulling Adam and Eve out by the hand).

No scholar seriously thinks Nicodemus himself wrote this text — its title is a medieval addition, and the work itself was composed centuries after his lifetime, a pseudonymous document. Still, the fact that a man John’s Gospel portrays as someone whose faith grew gradually was later reimagined, in church tradition, as the closest eyewitness “recorder” of Christ’s death and resurrection says something about how thoroughly this figure captured the imagination of the early church.

Sources

• Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (Anchor Bible, Doubleday, 1966)
• D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Pillar New Testament Commentary, Eerdmans, 1991)
• Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols. (Hendrickson, 2003)
• Gospel of Nicodemus / Acts of Pilate (c. 4th-5th c.)

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