The Gospel of Nicodemus is an early Christian text, composed in Greek by the fourth century AD, that retells the trial, death, and resurrection of Jesus — and then follows him down into the underworld. It combines two works: the Acts of Pilate, a dramatic expansion of Jesus' trial, and the Harrowing of Hell, the fullest ancient account of Christ's descent to free Adam and the righteous dead. It was never part of the Bible, but for a thousand years it was one of the most widely read Christian books in the world.
If you have ever seen a medieval painting of Christ standing on broken gates, reaching for an old man's wrist, or recited "he descended into hell" in the Apostles' Creed and wondered what story sits behind it, you have already met this book. This guide covers what the text is, what happens in both parts, why it became a medieval bestseller, the legends it spawned about Pontius Pilate, and why it never entered the canon.
Despite the name, the book is not a gospel in the usual sense — it does not cover Jesus' teaching or ministry. The title "Gospel of Nicodemus" is medieval; the older name is the Acts of Pilate, and the text presents itself as an official record of the trial, written down by Nicodemus — the Pharisee who visits Jesus by night in John 3 — and preserved in the governor's archives.
The book as it circulated in the Middle Ages has two distinct parts:
Honest dating matters here. A Christian "Acts of Pilate" was known by the mid-fourth century — the church father Epiphanius refers to one around 376 AD — and some scholars argue the core trial narrative drew on second- and third-century traditions, from an era when pagan writers circulated hostile forged "Acts of Pilate" and Christians had reason to answer with a version of their own. The Descent into Hell was originally a separate work, joined to the Acts of Pilate around the fifth or sixth century. No scholar regards any of it as an eyewitness court record; it is devotional storytelling built on the Gospel accounts, which places it among the apocrypha rather than among the historical sources for the trial.
The Acts of Pilate opens as the Jewish leaders bring Jesus to the governor's hall, and immediately does what it does best: expanding the terse Gospel trial scenes into courtroom drama full of witnesses, procedure, and omens.
The first miracle happens before a word of testimony. As Jesus is led in, the Roman standards — imperial banners topped with images of Caesar — bow down of their own accord in the hands of their bearers. The accusers protest that the bearers dipped them deliberately, so Pilate lets them choose twelve strong men of their own to hold the standards while Jesus is brought in again. The standards bow again. Pilate is shaken; his wife sends word of her dream, begging him to have nothing to do with this just man.
Then come the witnesses for the defense — the detail that made the text beloved. One by one, people Jesus healed step out of the crowd and testify: a man carried on his bed for thirty-eight years, a man born blind, a bent woman standing straight, a cleansed leper. And a woman named Bernice — Veronica in the Latin — testifies that she touched the hem of his garment and her twelve-year flow of blood stopped. The woman with the issue of blood is given a name here for the first time, and from this seed the whole medieval Veronica legend grew.
Nicodemus himself rises to argue that if this man's works are from God, no council can overthrow them. Pilate repeatedly finds no fault worthy of death, washes his hands, and gives way only under sustained pressure — pushing the Gospels' already sympathetic portrait of Pilate considerably further, which mattered enormously for his later legend.
After the crucifixion, the story does something no canonical Gospel does: it follows the investigation from the inside. Joseph of Arimathea, who buried Jesus, is arrested and sealed in a windowless room — and on Sunday morning the room is empty. The tomb guards report the angel and the rolled-away stone; three travelers from Galilee swear they saw Jesus alive and taken up into heaven. The council sends for Joseph, who explains, calmly, that the risen Jesus lifted him out of the sealed room himself. The first half ends with Jerusalem's leaders confronted by sworn testimony they cannot explain away — a resurrection apologetic in narrative form.
The second part opens with a storyteller's masterstroke. Among the dead raised at the crucifixion — an event mentioned in a single verse of Matthew — are two brothers, Karinus and Leucius, sons of the aged Simeon who once held the infant Jesus in the Temple. Found alive in Arimathea, they are brought to Jerusalem and asked to write down, separately, like legal witnesses, what they saw in the world below. Their accounts agree word for word, and what they describe became one of the most influential scenes in Christian imagination.
In the darkness of the underworld, where all the dead since Adam wait, a light suddenly shines. Isaiah stands and says this is the light he prophesied. John the Baptist arrives last of all the dead, a forerunner even here, announcing that the one he baptized is coming down. Adam's son Seth recounts an old promise: when he begged the oil of mercy for his dying father, an angel told him it would come after five and a half thousand years, when the Son of God descended to raise Adam.
Then the text pulls back the curtain on the other side. Satan and Hades — hell personified as a gloomy, anxious ruler — argue like two officials over a prisoner transfer gone wrong. Satan boasts that he has engineered the death of Jesus and orders Hades to hold him fast. Hades wants nothing to do with it: this is the man who tore Lazarus out of his grip; if he comes here of his own will, none of the dead will be safe. While they quarrel, a voice like thunder shakes the gates with the words of Psalm 24: "Lift up your gates, O princes." Hades barricades himself in. David and Isaiah tell him it is useless — they prophesied this. The voice comes again, the gates of brass shatter, the bars of iron break, and the King of Glory stands in hell.
Christ binds Satan and hands him over to Hades to hold until the second coming — a grim joke medieval audiences loved, hell left holding the devil. Then he takes Adam by the hand and leads him out, the patriarchs and prophets following, singing. At the gate of paradise they meet the only three residents already there: Enoch and Elijah, who never died, and the penitent thief, still carrying his cross, admitted on a promise made that same afternoon. The brothers finish writing, hand over their separate scrolls — identical to the letter — and vanish.
The Acts of Pilate and the Harrowing of Hell in one volume, in clear modern English — the full trial, the witnesses, and the descent. Members read free.
Get the Gospel of Nicodemus →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryIt is hard to overstate how popular the Gospel of Nicodemus was between roughly 500 and 1500 AD. More than four hundred Latin manuscripts survive — an enormous number for any non-biblical text — alongside Greek versions and early translations into Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. From the Latin it spread into virtually every vernacular of medieval Europe: Old English versions existed by around 1000 AD, with Middle English, French, German, Dutch, Norse, Irish, and Welsh to follow. Preachers quoted it, poets mined it, and Jacobus de Voragine used it for the Golden Legend, the most-read book of the late Middle Ages after the Bible itself.
The Harrowing scene had a second, even bigger life in image and performance. In the Eastern church, the standard resurrection icon — the Anastasis — is not the empty tomb but this scene: Christ standing on the shattered gates of Hades, hauling Adam and Eve out of their tombs by the wrist. In the West, the Harrowing became a fixture of the English mystery play cycles at York, Chester, and Wakefield, where audiences watched Christ batter a stage "hellmouth" while the devils panicked inside, and William Langland built the climax of Piers Plowman around it. Wherever medieval Christianity pictured Holy Saturday, it was picturing this book. If you want to understand why books outside the Bible mattered so much to Christian culture, this is exhibit A.
Because the text paints Pilate so sympathetically — a reluctant judge who declares Jesus innocent and is overborne — it seeded an entire cycle of Pilate literature. Medieval manuscripts often bundled the Gospel of Nicodemus with short sequels: a letter of Pilate reporting the resurrection to the emperor; an account of Tiberius summoning Pilate to Rome to answer for the crucifixion; and the Death of Pilate, in which the disgraced governor takes his own life and his body, thrown into the Tiber, stirs up such storms of demons that it must be moved — first to Vienne on the Rhône, finally to a mountain lake in the Swiss Alps. The peak looming over Lucerne is called Pilatus to this day, and legend long held that the governor's restless corpse lay in its waters.
The two halves of Christendom took his story in opposite directions. In the medieval West, Pilate hardened into a villain and a suicide. In parts of the East, the sympathetic portrait won: the Coptic Church came to honor Pilate as a repentant martyr, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church venerates Pilate and his wife Procla as saints, with a feast day on June 25. One apocryphal trial transcript generated a thousand years of legend running from a demon-haunted Swiss lake to an Ethiopian feast day.
The history-based answer is straightforward: it was never a candidate. When the fourth-century churches drew up their canon lists — the era of the Council of Laodicea and Athanasius' festal letter of 367 AD — the tests for a New Testament book were apostolic origin, antiquity, and universal use in worship from the earliest period. The Gospel of Nicodemus fails all three, and the church knew it: it appeared centuries after the apostles, was recognized as devotional expansion rather than apostolic testimony, and no ancient canon list includes it. Like the other books people assume were "removed" from the Bible, it was not cut in some later purge; it simply was never in.
What is distinctive is how the church treated it afterward. Unlike the Gnostic gospels, which were condemned as heretical, the Gospel of Nicodemus taught nothing the medieval church objected to — its theology of the descent even echoes the creed. So it was copied openly, read aloud, painted, and staged for a millennium, held in a category medieval readers understood well: edifying legend, profitable to read, but not Scripture. The canon line was never simply "approved" versus "banned" — there was a vast middle ground of beloved, non-canonical religious literature, and this book ruled it.
If you are interested in how Christians have imagined the Easter story — not only what the four Gospels record — this is one of the most rewarding apocryphal texts you can pick up. Modern readers get several things from it:
It reads in an afternoon. Pair it with the canonical trial narratives to see exactly where the expansion begins, and explore the wider pseudepigrapha to see the genre it belongs to. Our edition presents both parts — the Acts of Pilate and the Descent into Hell — in clear modern English, and our guides to the lost books can point you to what to read next.
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