Short Answer: What's With Jesus not Knowing Stuff?

Dear Apologist, Why did Jesus claim to not know when the world would end?  Shouldn’t He know everything?


In Mark’s Gospel we read Jesus saying:

“But about that day or hour no one knows; not even the angels, nor the Son, but only the Father” - Mark 13:32  

This saying has been the subject of much discussion throughout Church history. Today we will look at one approach to Christ’s professed ignorance.

Jesus is fully God and fully man, and therefore has both a divine intellect and a human intellect.  We see both at work in the New Testament.  We see His divine omniscience in places like John 4:17 where Jesus knows the sins of the woman at the well.  However, in Luke 2:52 the text also says Jesus grew in wisdom as He reached adulthood. Therefore, there had to be borders to Jesus’ human knowledge.  Regarding this, the Catechism says:

"This human soul that the Son of God assumed is endowed with a true human knowledge. As such, this knowledge could not in itself be unlimited." - CCC 472

Therefore, one possible solution to this conundrum is to imagine Jesus running off two hard drives.  His D drive (divine drive) has all possible knowledge.  The H drive (human drive) houses the knowledge He’s acquired through ordinary human means. 

Jesus is normally using the H drive, but at any given time He can copy information from the D drive to the H drive.  So He could download whatever information was necessary for His saving mission… which didn’t include the date of the world’s end. 

Again, the Catechism says:

“By union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in His human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans He had come to reveal. What He admitted to not knowing in this area, He elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal.”  - CCC 474