Did Jesus know everything while he was on earth?
The short answer
Jesus, as God, lacks no knowledge, yet in his genuine humanity he grew in wisdom and said plainly that he did not know the day or hour of his return. The Gospels hold both together: he voluntarily lived within real human limits without ceasing to be fully God.
The fuller answer
The Gospels give two sets of facts that Christians refuse to choose between. Jesus reads thoughts, knows a woman's past at a well, and knows who will betray him before the betrayer does. Yet the same Gospels show him asking questions, being amazed at faith and unbelief, and learning obedience through suffering. Any answer that quietly deletes one set of facts has stopped describing the Jesus of the texts.
No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
Mark 13:32 (BSB)
The hardest verse is his own statement that no one knows the day or hour of the end, not even the Son, but only the Father. Christians have never been free to soften it. The early church kept the verse in its Gospels and confessed it anyway, which tells us they understood his earthly life to involve a real, voluntary acceptance of human limitation, not a performance of ignorance he did not feel.
And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.
Luke 2:52 (BSB)
Luke says the child Jesus grew in wisdom as well as in height and favour. Growth in wisdom is meaningless if nothing was ever genuinely new to him. Paul explains the pattern: though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. The emptying is not the loss of deity. It is the refusal to use deity as a shortcut around a true human life.
but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness.
Philippians 2:7 (BSB)
Hebrews adds that he learned obedience through what he suffered, language that again assumes real development. The settled Christian reading is this: the Son remains omniscient as God, but during his earthly life he chose to know and experience life as humans do, within the limits of the nature he had taken. That restraint is part of the incarnation's cost, and part of why he can sympathise with us.
Sources
- Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
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