Chapter 15 — What Jesus Did and Didn't Know
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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There's a verse in the Gospels that has puzzled readers for centuries. Jesus, speaking about the timing of his return, says: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32).
The Son doesn't know? If Jesus is God, and God knows everything — how can the Son not know something the Father knows?
This is one of the most common objections raised against the deity of Christ. And it's a good question. It deserves a real answer.
Chapter 15 of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics tackles this issue directly, and what it finds is something beautiful: the mystery of what Jesus knew and didn't know is not a contradiction of the incarnation. It is one of its most profound expressions.
What Jesus Clearly Did Know
Let's start with the evidence that Jesus possessed knowledge no ordinary human being could have. The Gospels are full of it.
He knew what people were thinking. When religious leaders silently questioned his authority to forgive sins, "Right away Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were thinking like this within themselves" (Mark 2:8). This was not educated guesswork — he simply knew their thoughts.
He knew Nathanael before they met. "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you" (John 1:48). Nathanael was stunned: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God!"
He knew the Samaritan woman's entire marital history (John 4:17-18). He knew Lazarus had died before any messenger arrived (John 11:14). He predicted Peter's denial with specific detail — three times, before the rooster crowed (Luke 22:34). He knew Judas would betray him (John 6:64). He knew exactly where the disciples would find a colt, then a room for the Passover meal, down to specific details about what they would encounter (Mark 11:2-3; 14:13-15).
The cumulative effect is striking: Jesus knew things that no natural human perception could explain. He knew the contents of minds and hearts. He knew events before they happened. He knew the private histories of strangers.
The Knowledge Only God Has
In the Old Testament, knowledge of the human heart is explicitly attributed to God alone: "You, you only, know the hearts of all the children of mankind" (1 Kings 8:39). It's one of the definitive markers of divine knowledge — the ability to read what is hidden within a person.
Yet the Gospels repeatedly attribute this to Jesus. When he forgave the paralyzed man's sins, he was qualified to do so because he knew the man's heart (implied in his knowing the thoughts of the critical scribes). When he said "many believed in him, but Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man" (John 2:24-25) — this is the language of divine omniscience applied to Jesus without apology.
What Jesus Didn't Know
And yet: "About that day or hour no one knows, not even the Son" (Mark 13:32).
How do we hold these two things together?
The answer the historic church has offered, and that the evidence supports, is the doctrine of the incarnation itself: Jesus was genuinely, fully human and genuinely, fully divine — one person with two natures. During his earthly life, the Son who was fully divine chose to experience the full reality of human limitation, including limited access to certain kinds of knowledge in his human experience.
This isn't a contradiction. It's a consequence of what it means for God to truly become human. A genuinely human experience involves not knowing everything. A genuinely divine nature is omniscient. Both are true of Jesus, in different respects, because both natures are fully real.
The church fathers sometimes described this as the Son's willingness to "not use" certain divine capacities in his human life — not because he ceased to be divine, but because he embraced human limitation as part of the incarnation. What he "didn't know" in his human experience, he nonetheless knew as the eternal divine Son.
We don't need to fully resolve the mystery to recognize that the biblical evidence doesn't undermine the deity of Christ. It actually illuminates what it means for God to become one of us in the fullest sense.
For Us
There's enormous comfort in this, when you think about it. When Jesus wept at Lazarus's tomb (John 11:35), he didn't cry because he was confused — he knew perfectly well he was about to raise his friend. He cried because he entered into human grief. Fully.
When Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, "Not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42), he was not merely performing humility. He was genuinely wrestling with what lay ahead, in the full humanity of a person who felt what suffering meant.
God didn't put on a human costume. He became human — all the way in, all the way down. And that means he knows what it's like to be us, in ways that no merely divine observer ever could.
He knows. And he cares. And he saves.
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