A Pharisee and an archōn — a ruler, almost certainly a member of the council — who comes to Jesus by night in John 3. ⚠ His name is Greek, not Hebrew: Nikodēmos, 'victory of the people,' an ordinary Greek name borne by a leading Judaean, which is itself a small fact about how mixed that world was. He appears three times and only in this Gospel, and the three form a line: at night with questions (3:1-2); then at 7:50, alone in the council, insisting the law give a man a hearing before it condemns him; then at 19:39, in daylight, carrying about a hundred Roman pounds of myrrh and aloes to bury an executed man — a quantity fit for a king's funeral and an act that would have made him unclean and conspicuous at once. The Gospel never says he believed; it just moves him from the dark to the daylight and lets the reader notice. Later tradition supplies far more (a Gospel of Nicodemus, a martyrdom, a place in the Talmud as Naqdimon ben Gurion), none of it early and none of it assumed here.