Both the author and the exact date when the work was written remain - as is the case with most apocryphal texts of the Bible - unknown. Various testimonies, however, lead us to place it in the early 4th century AD, during the period of the Roman Tetrarchy.

Then, amidst the fire of persecutions that the authorities would unleash against the Christians, the "Gospel of Nicodemus" - or otherwise the "Acts of Pilate," to use the title by which the apocryphon first appears in ancient sources - will be born out of the needs to defend the faith.

The rumors, specifically, which circulated by word of mouth among the members of the Church about the proceedings of the trial of Jesus Christ crystallize under the pressure of external circumstances into a written text, which narrates minute by minute what happened inside the praetorium of Jerusalem during the trial of the God-Man by Pontius Pilate.

Many unknown details of the Passion, which are not preserved by the official evangelists of the Church, are described in the apocryphon with an evidently apologetic purpose: to shed ample light on the causes that led to the judicial persecution of Jesus Christ and, subsequently, to his unjust death on the cross under the charge of "high treason" (crimen laesae majestatis), according to Roman law.

The entire conspiracy hatched against him by the chief priests and scribes of the Jews emerges to the surface through the examination of witnesses who come forward spontaneously and testify at the tribunal of Pontius Pilate. From their mouths, we also hear many of the miracles that Jesus performed, such as that of the man born blind (John 9:1-7) or the paralytic of Capernaum (Matthew 9:1-8), a fact that confirms the metaphysical mystery surrounding the protagonists as well as the final outcome of the trial.