- The Hypostatic Union (Two Natures)
- Kenosis (Voluntary Self-Limitation)
- The Semantics of "Knowing" in a First-Century Jewish Context.
The most common refutation relies on the doctrine defined at the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD): Jesus is one person with two distinct natures—fully divine and fully human.
According to His human nature: Jesus experienced genuine human limitations. He grew in wisdom (Luke 2:52), grew hungry, grew tired, and had localized, finite human knowledge.
According to His divine nature: He remained omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
When Jesus says "nor the Son," He is speaking from the standpoint of His human nature and His earthly mission. If having human limitations disproves His divinity, then Jesus weeping, bleeding, or dying would also disprove it. Christians argue that the Incarnation means God the Son truly entered into human limitation, including a localized human intellect, without ceasing to be God.
2. Kenosis (Voluntary Self-Limitation)This approach looks to Philippians 2:5-7, which states that Christ, though being in the very form of God, "emptied himself (ekenÅsen), by taking the form of a servant."
Under this framework, Jesus did not lose His divine attributes, but He voluntarily chose to restrict His access to them while operating on Earth to live a genuinely human life in perfect submission to the Father.
Jesus could have known the Hour, just as He could have called down legions of angels to save Himself from the cross.
Instead, He chose to operate strictly within the bounds of what the Father revealed to Him by the Holy Spirit during His earthly ministry.
Therefore, a voluntary restriction of knowledge does not equal an essential lack of divinity.
3. The Idiom of "Knowing" (Declarative Authority)Another compelling counterargument focuses on the cultural context and the Greek word used for "knowing" (eidenai or oida). In ancient Hebrew and Greco-Roman thought, "knowing" a matter can mean having the authority to decree or declare it.
A common parallel is found in first-century Jewish wedding customs:
The groom would prepare a wedding chamber at his father's house.
When asked when the wedding would take place, the groom would traditionally say, "Only my father knows." This didn't mean the groom was literally ignorant or suffered from amnesia; it meant it was the father's exclusive prerogative to trigger the event.
We see Jesus echo this exact authority-based definition of "knowing" after His resurrection in Acts 1:7. When the disciples ask Him again about the timing of the kingdom, He doesn't say "I don't know." Instead, He says: "It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority." Furthermore, Paul uses "know" in a declarative sense in 1 Corinthians 2:2: "For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." Paul clearly had other cognitive knowledge, but he chose not to declare or focus on anything else.
See Why Didn't Jesus & the Holy Spirit Know the Hour? - short video (5 mins)The argument relies on a fallacy of Modalism or an oversimplification of the Trinity. It assumes that if Jesus is God, He must be identical to the Father in His earthly presentation. It also ignores the historical Jewish context in which it was written.
By looking at the broader context of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus routinely claims divine prerogatives, He forgives sins, commands angels, rewrites the Mosaic Law, and accepts worship. Therefore, Matthew 24:36 is read by theologians not as a denial of Christ's divine essence but as a demonstration of the functional hierarchy within the Trinity and the reality of the Incarnation.
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