What Did Jesus Know and When Did He Know It?
Did Jesus have the thoughts that God has, or did Jesus think like God did? We can offer a general answer to frame the discussion: Given the design of the Incarnation, the human mind of Christ had access to divine communication whenever required. This can be thought of as an aspect of the anointing of the Holy Spirit by which Christ did all His works on our behalf as a man. Or it may be that in some cases, there could be direct communication from the divine mind to the human, given the Hypostatic Union. That is a lot. We are not told in Scripture the exact mechanism, only that He was in fact truly God and truly man. One implication of being truly man is having a human mind.
None of this implies that what Christ did know and say is in any way defective. The opposite of omniscience is not error; and human knowledge can be a perfect knowledge in a way fitting for a human. Consequently, this does not in any way minimize the infallible truth of all that Jesus spoke.
The Divine Knowledge of the Son
There is a simple logic to this profound mystery. God knows all things. Jesus is God. Therefore, Jesus knows all things. This is true of His eternal essence—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (Jn. 1:1-2).
It is an error to say that one can only know of God what Jesus shows in His human nature. When Jesus tells us that He is “the way” to view God in texts like John 1:18 or 14:9, the point is not to say that He is only revealing His humanity. Something like this mistake can take a more obscure path from the premises of Karl Barth and his followers. They would affirm the divinity of the Son as much as we. Yet being predisposed against any metaphysical theology—against the attempt to speak of God in Himself without almost comprehensive deference to God for us, or God in Christ—however pious sounding, this begins to block access for a more contemplative theology about the eternal Son.
Let us start in a simpler place. For one thing, Scripture itself will make reference to the deity of the Son. For another, one can make inferences either from those texts or from inferences already rightly made.
Stephen Charnock applies divine omniscience to the Son in four ways:
(1) He has perfect knowledge of the Father—“no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son” (Mat. 11:27). It is true that the next words speak of Christ’s sovereignty in giving the knowledge of the Father to believers, but it is plain that one implication of the believer’s knowledge of the Father being derived is that it is imperfect, whereas one implication of the Son’s knowledge of the Father being natural is that it is perfect.
(2) Christ knows all creatures—This must be a total knowledge, following from the first point. Charnock says, “That knowledge that comprehends God comprehends all created things as they are in God.” So with references to all the works of God, Jesus says, “Whatsoever the Father does, that the Son does” (Jn. 5:19). As John 1:3 does, so in a few places, Paul assigns all things as being created by Christ (1 Cor. 8:6, Col. 1:16); so, “he cannot be ignorant of all things that were effected by him and are referred to him.”1
(3) Christ knows the heart and affections of men—When Peter was questioned as to his love for Jesus, he responded truly: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (Jn. 21:17). Conversely, Jesus knew the whole life of the Samaritan woman’s sins (Jn. 4:16-18). Yet it was confessed of God: “For you, even you only, know the hearts of all the children of men” (1 Kings 8:39); and it was Christ who said, “I will give to every one of you according to your works” (Rev. 22:12).
(4) Christ had a foreknowledge of the particular inclinations of men before those distinct inclinations were in actual being in them—This happens quite a bit in the Gospels. For example, “For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him” (Jn. 6:64). As with Judas on one side of the eternal decree, so with Peter on the other: “Truly, I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times” (Mat. 26:34), and yet also, “And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Lk. 22:32).
Thus, he concludes: “Shall we then conclude our blessed Savior as a creature, who perfectly and only knew the Father, who knew all creatures, who had all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, who knew the inward motions of men’s hearts by his own virtue, and who had not only a present knowledge but a prescience of them?”2
The Human Knowledge of the Son
The first thing we must do in considering how Jesus knew in the Incarnation is to distinguish between the divine nature and the human nature of Christ. Since the essence of God cannot change, then it follows that His knowledge (omniscience) cannot change. Consequently, just as with all of His other divine attributes, the omniscience of the eternal Son was not altered by the Incarnation. It is the human nature taken on that undergoes all changes. This includes a human mind that experiences things in a sequence. That is why we see statements like this in the Gospels:
“And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Lk. 2:52)
“And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my garments?’” (Mk. 5:30)
“When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith’” (Mat. 8:10).
These passages mean exactly what they say; and yet they are speaking of the human nature of Christ. All of this to say that Christ’s omniscience was not diminished in any way during the Incarnation. Rather, “the word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14), which is a shorthand way to say that the eternal Son assumed to Himself a true human nature. That union included a real human mind that is not omniscient, or as the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms put it, “a reasonable soul.”3 How the divine and human “interact” may be an infinite mystery, but there is no conflict at all or confusion of the two natures.
This is really the ultimate answer to that most difficult passage about what Jesus knew and when He knew it. It comes from the Olivet Discourse, which ought to remind us that there is an extra layer of difficulty in terms of how to interpret what time period (or is it more than one time?) that Jesus is addressing to begin with. He says,
“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Mat. 24:36).
This may seem all the more curious if we remember how Jesus elsewhere says, “For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing” (Jn. 5:20). Christians who may not make a study of dogmatic theology, but who have a good theologian’s instinct for putting the puzzle pieces together, may respond that the John 5:20 passage has reference to the divine nature while the Matthew 24:36 passage has reference to the human nature. This is exactly the right thinking. Certainly we cannot chalk up the saying in the Olivet Discourse to what some will falsely label “accommodation,” if what is meant only conceals an inaccurate statement of facts.
But for the student of Scripture who possesses such instincts, yet may be lacking in the terminology, we receive help from those wise kingdom scribes from times past. They speak of a doctrine that was known in Latin as the communicatio idiomatum. What this means, essentially, is the sharing or communication of properties. Reduced to a concise formula, we can say that (1) whatever is true of either nature (divine or human) may be affirmed, in a real sense, of the whole Person of the Son, (2) so long as each nature remains unconfused with the other. Hence we are right to say that Jesus was eternal, even while we understand that the human name given to the infant by Mary was revealed in time, as Matthew 1:21 tells us. It remains true that the Person who is named “Jesus” is eternal precisely because He is the Word who took on flesh (Jn. 1:14).
Acts 20:28 gives one biblical example of this with the “blood of God.” Of course the divine nature does not bleed. Yet because Christ’s human nature can, and Christ is God, then the subject “Christ” can truly be predicated of that which is human (with respect to that nature) without the predicate being confused with the logically distinct subject “eternal Son.” So for the same reason, Jesus can attribute to “the Son” a lack of knowledge in Matthew 24:36 with respect to his humanity, since his human nature is (1) a legitimate subject denoted by “the Son” (2) without being logically identical to the subject term “the divine essence of the Son.”
That leaves for another day a detailed study of the “when did He know it?” Some will say that we cannot know. Perhaps they are right. However, it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that the glorified human Christ, reigning from His throne, knows the time in what theologians call His state of exaltation, whereas this was withheld from Him as a dimension of His state of humiliation. It is at least unreasonable to suppose that He will not know until the very moment when He returns, if one can even map out the “time” of that heavenly reign to match our own timeline. That really is another matter.
Out of the Maze of Errors about What Jesus Knew
Apollinarianism taught that the logos merely inhabited the human body of Jesus. The divine Son, in a sense, did all of the thinking for Him. One modern author even called this the “God-in-a-bod” heresy. Nestorianism so conceived of the human attributes as having to constitute a person. In this way, it made a looser union of a divine person and a human person.
Sometimes theologians can become so sharp in their criticism of a trend that they speak themselves into such a heresy.
For example, N. T. Wright comes perilously close to what could be called a neo-Nestorianism. Following from his equation of metaphysical thinking to Gnosticism, Wright sees orthodox Christology in the West as docetic—docetism being the error which denied that the Son really took on flesh—so that,
“[This view] saw Jesus as a demigod, not really human at all, striding through the world as a divine, heroic figure, untroubled by human questions, never wrestling with vocation, aware of himself as someone from outside the whole system, telling people how they might escape the wicked world and live forever in a different realm altogether.”4
While the Bible does tell us as much as we might like to know about the beginnings of Jesus’s self-knowledge, there is indication in Luke’s Gospel especially that part of his growing in wisdom (2:52) manifested itself in circumstances like the one recorded in his teaching in the Temple (2:41-51). Consider also that Jesus spent his boyhood in the Jewish religious life, reading the Scriptures that were about Him (Jn. 5:39).
We cannot reduce Jesus’ knowledge to being merely “supernatural” in the sense of the most elevated humanity. Charnock adds even about His prophetic office: “He is not only the revealer of what he knows—so were the prophets according to their measures—but the counselor of what he revealed, having a perfect understanding of all the counsels of God, as being interested in them, as the mighty God.”5
In other words, as God knows all that He does by virtue of Himself—no unit of knowledge being caused by the objects ad extra so known—so the eternal Son tells you what He knows in undivided concert with what He does. It is an atemporal knowledge, by pure act, undivided, intuited, independent, immutable, infallible, and perpetual.
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1. Stephen Charnock, Discourses on the Existence and Attributes of God, Volume I (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 695.
2. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, 698.
3. Westminster Shorter Catechism Q.22 and Larger Catechism Q.37.
4. N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 24.
5. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, I:693.
