WHAT CAN WE SAY OF NICODEMUS OF ORIGEN?

Almost nothing remains of what Origen wrote about Nicodemus: the relevant passages in the Commentary on John are lost, and in his other works the exegete hardly mentions Nicodemus. We are therefore reduced to using the catenae fragments on John, in spite of the fact that their relationship to Origen's text is scant, and that all of them cannot be attributed to him. Most of these fragments present Nicodemus as an obscure character, an average Pharisee, but one who belonged to the crowd that believed in the name of Jesus. If he did not know where the spirit came from or where it was going, he heard it blow. Mostly, he actually understood what Jesus said to him: we have to become like children to enter the Kingdom of God. For the Alexandrian exegete Nicodemus was "not illuminated yet" but walked forward on the path to truth.