The Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate)

The familiar title is not the original one. The ancient work is normally called the Acts of Pilate; Gospel of Nicodemus arose later, when medieval manuscripts — especially the expanded Latin forms — attributed the narrative to Nicodemus, the Pharisee and secret disciple of John 3, 7 and 19.

No historical evidence makes Nicodemus its author. The attribution is pseudonymous, the work was composed centuries after the events it describes, and it draws on the canonical Gospels, on early Christian tradition, and on later legendary elaboration accumulated across many recensions. Nicodemus is nevertheless a real biblical person and an important character inside the story, defending Christ before Pilate and taking part in the investigation after the Resurrection.

Both names are used on this site, because the double title is itself the warning: what modern readers call the Gospel of Nicodemus is not one book written at one time by one author. Its older core circulated as the Acts of Pilate or Gesta Pilati; its second half circulated separately as the Descensus Christi ad Inferos; and the two were joined in later recensions.

Dating means dating the parts. The surviving Christian Acts of Pilate probably developed in the fourth century, though traditions inside it may be older, and scholarship disagrees on the details while placing the developed forms broadly in late antiquity.

One piece of historical context is worth knowing. Eusebius reports that an anti-Christian Acts of Pilate was circulated under the Emperor Maximin Daia around AD 311–312 — a forged official record intended to discredit Christ. Some scholars have proposed that the Christian Acts of Pilate arose partly in answer to that literature, which would make this book, in origin, a reply.

The Descent into Hades appears to have had a literary history of its own before being attached to the Acts. So the sentence "the Gospel of Nicodemus was written in AD —" cannot be completed honestly. The form used here is that its Acts of Pilate core developed principally in the fourth century, while the Descent material has its own transmission and joined the Acts in later recensions.

This became one of the most widely copied Christian apocrypha of the Middle Ages, surviving in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Church Slavonic, Old English, Old Norse and many medieval vernaculars. Its Latin tradition is enormous, and NASSCAL catalogues roughly 190 Church Slavonic manuscripts in long and short redactions — so it circulated widely in Byzantine and Slavic Christian culture as well as in the West. As everywhere in this section, wide copying is not canonisation.

More important for anyone citing it: there is no single medieval Gospel of Nicodemus. The story changes between recensions, sometimes dramatically. Byzantine Greek forms give particular weight to the Theotokos and to Pilate; Old Norse adaptations bring in Norse literary imagery; Old English versions can present Christ almost as a warrior storming the stronghold of Hades.

The practical rule follows. "The Gospel of Nicodemus says…" is not a safe sentence where the detail is textually variable, and a reference should name the part — Acts of Pilate or Descent — and, where it matters, the recension.

The first half expands the canonical Passion. Christ stands before Pilate; witnesses come forward, among them people He healed, to testify to His miracles; Nicodemus speaks in His defence. The narrative weaves material from all four Gospels together and adds a great deal that is in none of them.

Its most memorable invention is the scene of the standards. The Roman standard-bearers carry the imperial ensigns into the hall, and as Christ enters the standards bow to Him of their own accord. Pilate suspects the soldiers of lowering them deliberately and orders other men — men chosen by Christ's accusers — to hold them. It happens again.

It is a symbolic confession rather than a report: the ensigns of Caesar's empire bow before the King who is being tried by it. That belongs under extra-biblical narrative, not Orthodox teaching, and it should be enjoyed as what it is.

A good deal of what this book contributed to later Christianity is names. Scripture leaves several figures of the Passion unnamed, and the Acts of Pilate and the traditions around it supplied names that then became fixed in Christian memory — so fixed that people are often surprised to learn they are not in the Gospels.

Pilate's wife is troubled by a dream in Matthew 27.19 and is not named there; versions of the Acts of Pilate call her Procla or Procula, and a broader Christian tradition about her grew from that. The woman healed of an issue of blood comes forward at the trial to testify; later Western tradition identifies her as Veronica and develops the story of the veil. The two thieves crucified beside Christ are unnamed in all four Gospels; this tradition gives them Dysmas — also Dimas or Demas — for the one who repented, and Gestas for the other.

Joseph of Arimathea receives a full expansion. Because he has given his own tomb and cared for the burial, the hostile authorities imprison him; after the Resurrection he is gone from a sealed cell, and later reports that the risen Christ appeared to him and delivered him. Scripture says that he received and buried the body, and nothing about an imprisonment or a rescue.

In every case the person is canonical and the name or the episode is not. That distinction is worth keeping crisply, because these are among the most-repeated pieces of extra-biblical material in all of Christianity.

The turn from the trial to the underworld is made through one of the strangest passages in the Gospels. Matthew says that at Christ's death the tombs were opened, the bodies of many saints were raised, and after His Resurrection they came into the holy city and appeared to many.

Matthew does not say who they were. This book asks, and answers: two of them were Leucius and Karinus, sons of Simeon — that is, of Simeon the God-Receiver, who had held the infant Christ in the Temple. Having come back from among the dead, they can testify to what happened there.

They are questioned separately, placed in different rooms and told to write down what they saw, and their two accounts agree word for word. That is the frame, and the Descent narrative is presented as their testimony.

It is a literary device, and a good one, and it should not be described as eyewitness documentation. The resurrection at Matthew 27.52–53 is canonical; the names, the brothers and the miraculously matching depositions are not.

The most useful thing this book can teach a modern reader is a set of distinctions that English religious language has largely flattened.

Hades in this narrative is not merely a place. It is personified — a power that speaks, reasons, gives orders, fortifies its gates and is afraid. It stands for the realm of the dead and for the dominion that realm exercises, and it is best classified as a personified cosmic power rather than as another demon.

Hades is also not Gehenna. It is the realm of the dead, corresponding to the Hebrew Sheol, and translating it flatly as "Hell" imports a later and different idea. The OCA makes the same point about the Anastasis icon: what Christ descends into is the biblical realm of the dead. This page uses Hades throughout, except when quoting a historical translation.

And Hades is not Satan. They are distinct figures who argue with one another, and the argument is the finest thing in the book. Satan has arranged Christ's death and comes to announce that he is bringing Him down; Hades is appalled. Death, as a third term, is the power or condition under which humanity is held. The three overlap without being identical, and keeping them apart is far closer to how ancient Christians spoke than the single undifferentiated devil of later popular usage.

Hades has a specific reason to be afraid, and it is the best piece of theological imagination in the whole work: it has met this man's power before, and lost.

You sent me Lazarus, Hades tells Satan in effect, and I could not keep him. Christ called from outside, and the realm of the dead had to give him back — against everything in its nature, and without so much as a struggle it could win.

From that, Hades draws the obvious conclusion. If a word spoken from outside could empty a tomb, then bringing this man inside will not be a victory but a catastrophe: He will not be a prisoner, He will be an invasion, and the realm may be emptied altogether.

None of this is in John 11, which reports the raising of Lazarus from the outside only. What this book does is ask what that miracle looked like from below, and answer that Hades had already been put on notice. It is one of the clearest examples in this section of an ancient Christian writer taking a canonical event and imagining its unseen side.

The scene shifts to those already there — Adam, Seth, Abraham, Isaiah, David, John the Baptist and the other righteous of the old covenant, waiting in the dark. A light appears in it, and they recognise what it means.

The prophets then speak their own prophecies, as dialogue. Isaiah says what he foretold while alive and declares that it is happening now; David speaks his psalms; each one bears witness that what he announced on earth has arrived here. The effect is a reading of the entire Old Testament as expectation of this moment, delivered by the people who wrote it.

John the Baptist's part is the most elegant idea in the book. On earth he went before Christ; in Hades he goes before Christ, announcing to the dead that the Saviour is coming. His title simply continues past his death, which is why the episode has always felt so natural to Christian readers.

That John is the Forerunner is Orthodox theology. That he preached a sermon in Hades before Christ's arrival is this book's extension of it, and cannot be established from Scripture.

Adam then asks his son Seth to tell the others what he saw, and the book reaches back into a much older body of tradition to fill the gap.

Seth recounts how, when Adam was dying, he went towards the gate of Paradise to beg oil from the tree of mercy to anoint his father — and how the archangel told him that he could not have it yet, that the oil of mercy would not be given until the appointed years were fulfilled and the Son of God should come and anoint all who believe. Seth has been carrying that answer for the whole of human history, and he delivers it in the moment it comes true.

The episode is not native to this book. It belongs to the Life of Adam and Eve and the Apocalypse of Moses, and its presence here shows what the Gospel of Nicodemus actually is — a crossroads where Adam literature, Passion traditions, traditions about the realm of the dead, and Old Testament prophecy all meet and are resolved into one scene.

The climax begins with a voice like thunder outside: Lift up your gates, O rulers, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. It is Psalm 23 (24).7, turned into dialogue.

Hades asks the question the psalm itself asks — Who is this King of Glory? — and the righteous answer with the psalm's own answer: the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. A processional psalm has become a battle cry at the doors of death, and the Church has read it that way ever since.

Hades orders the gates secured: bronze doors, iron bars, locks, the whole fortification of the realm. They fail. Christ enters and the gates are broken.

The imagery is assembled out of Scripture rather than invented. God breaks the gates of bronze and cuts the bars of iron in Psalm 106 (107).16; He shatters the doors of bronze in Isaiah 45.2; the gates of Hades shall not prevail in Matthew 16.18; Christ holds the keys of death and Hades in Revelation 1.18. What this book does is gather them into a single scene.

Inside, Christ orders Satan bound and handed over — and the biblical pattern behind it is explicit: the strong man must first be bound before his house can be plundered, in Matthew 12.29; the adversary is bound in Revelation 20; through death Christ destroys the one who holds the power of death, in Hebrews 2.14. Christ has entered the strong man's house. Then He takes the captives.

And then the moment the whole book exists for. Christ finds Adam, takes him by the hand, and raises him.

Everything in the narrative has been arranged so that this is the point of it. The descent is not the rescue of a set of individually deserving individuals; it is the recovery of Adam, and through Adam of the race. The righteous follow Him out, and in Paradise they meet the Good Thief, already arrived with the promise Christ made him from the Cross — so that the man crucified that morning is in Paradise before the patriarchs who waited millennia, which is exactly the point the episode is making about mercy.

One caution on who leaves. The narrative concentrates on Adam, the patriarchs and the prophets, and later Christian formulations differ over whether Christ delivered all humanity, all the righteous, or those who received His preaching. That question belongs to Scripture, the Fathers and the liturgy. It should not be settled from this book.

Partly — and the wording has to be careful, because this is the strongest documented link between anything in this section and Orthodox visual tradition.

The standard Anastasis image has Christ at the centre, the gates of Hades broken beneath Him in the shape of a cross, locks and keys and chains scattered in the dark, Hades or Satan bound below, Adam grasped by the wrist and pulled upward, Eve beside him, David and Solomon, John the Baptist, and the righteous of the old covenant gathered around. Every one of those details is in the Descent narrative.

Early examples bear the connection out. A ninth-century fresco at San Clemente in Rome shows Christ standing over Satan and drawing Adam from the underworld; the ninth-century Fieschi Morgan staurotheke carries Descent imagery; the fourteenth-century Chora church in Constantinople gives the scene its most famous form, with Christ pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs. Anna Kartsonis's Anastasis — The Making of an Image is the standard study of how the picture was assembled.

So: the theology of the icon is biblical, patristic and liturgical, and older than this book. The dramatic narrative that the icon depicts — the shattered gates, the personified adversary underfoot, the hand closing on Adam's wrist — owes a great deal to it. The Gospel of Nicodemus was an important literary contributor to how the victory came to be pictured. It is not the source of what the picture means.

The same relationship holds for the services. The hymnography of Great and Holy Saturday personifies Hades exactly as this book does — Hades lamenting that its power is destroyed, that its gates are broken, that those it swallowed are being taken from it — and the OCA describes the day in these terms: Christ resting bodily in the tomb and at the same time descending to Hades, seeking Adam, giving life to the dead and shattering the gates. This page describes that hymnography rather than quoting it.

The Paschal homily attributed to St John Chrysostom does the same thing, and does it more famously: Hades receives a body and meets God, takes earth and encounters heaven, and is embittered and overthrown and mocked. Read beside the Descent narrative the resemblance is startling.

The temptation is to conclude that the services borrowed from the apocryphon, and it should be resisted. The personification of Hades was already part of early Christian Paschal rhetoric, and the homily, 1 Peter and this book are best read together as witnesses to one widespread motif rather than as a chain of copying. Shared early Christian Paschal tradition; direct dependence not required, and not demonstrated.

What can be said without hedging is why the book feels so Orthodox to a modern reader. It is not that Orthodoxy took its Pascha from an apocryphon. It is that both are drawing on the same conviction, held from the beginning, that what happened between the Cross and the empty tomb was a battle, and that it was won.

The teaching this book dramatises is not in question and does not depend on it. Set out plainly, so that the narrative can be enjoyed without being mistaken for its own foundation:

The Gospel of Nicodemus is not canonical Scripture in the Orthodox Church, and no part of this page should be read as suggesting otherwise. Its wide transmission in Greek, Slavonic and Latin shows that Christians copied and read it for more than a thousand years; it does not show that any Church received it.

Its influence, though, was extraordinary — on Byzantine art, on medieval Latin Christianity, on Slavic and Old English literature, on the mystery plays and Passion dramas, on later depictions of Hades, and on the legends that grew around Pilate, Joseph of Arimathea, Veronica and the Good Thief. Few Christian apocrypha shaped popular devotion more.

Which produces an unusual double conclusion, and both halves need saying. That Christ's descent into Hades comes from the Gospel of Nicodemus is false — the belief is older and rests on Scripture and early Christian preaching. That the book therefore has nothing to do with Orthodoxy is also false: its narrative demonstrably shaped how the victory was pictured, and Orthodox sources discuss its relationship with the Anastasis image openly. Liturgical and iconographic tradition can carry motifs also found in noncanonical literature without that literature becoming Scripture.

The fullest modern Orthodox treatment is on The Lord of Spirits. In "The Lord of Spirits Goes to Hell", Fr Stephen De Young and Fr Andrew Stephen Damick set Christ's descent within a much larger biblical theology of Sheol, death, the hostile powers and Christ's victory — and only at the end read from the Descent narrative, describing it as a fourth-century text drawing on older traditions and as an imaginative account of what was happening in the underworld while the Passion was happening on earth.

The order there is worth copying, and this page has copied it. The doctrine is built biblically first; the apocryphon then enters as an early Christian literary witness to how Christians pictured those realities. It is never the foundation.

In April 2022 Fr Andrew recorded a complete reading of the Harrowing of Hell narrative, introducing it by saying plainly that the work is apocryphal, that it is not Scripture, that Christians do not treat it as Scripture, and that it reflects traditions surrounding New Testament events. That is probably the strongest modern Orthodox encouragement to actually read one of the texts in this section — offered with the caveat attached, which is the right way to offer it.

It can illuminate how late-antique Christians imagined the descent into Hades; the growth of the Harrowing narrative; late-antique and medieval Passion traditions; the personification of Hades and its distinction from Satan and from Death; Adam-centred Paschal imagery; the development of Anastasis iconography; the traditions around the Good Thief, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, Procla and Veronica; the Christian reading of Old Testament prophecy; and the relationship between Scripture, liturgy, iconography and popular Christian narrative.

It cannot establish Orthodox dogma; an eyewitness transcript of events in Hades; that Hades and Satan literally held a conversation; that Leucius and Karinus wrote reports; the historical names of the two thieves; the name Veronica for the woman healed of the issue of blood; the later career of Joseph of Arimathea; precisely who was delivered from Hades; that Holy Saturday worship originated here; or that every detail of the Anastasis icon comes from this book alone.

The table applies the distinction to the claims most often repeated about it — and this book attracts more of them than any other in this section, because so much of what it contains has quietly passed into what people assume the Gospels say.