Apologetics · FaithLogic
Every Divine Attribute — Applied to Jesus in the New Testament
John 2:24–25: "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." He knows what is in every person — the hidden contents of the human heart. In Jeremiah 17:10, YHWH says: "I the LORD search the heart and test the mind." Jesus possesses the attribute YHWH claims as his own exclusive divine prerogative.
Revelation 2–3 — Letters to the Seven Churches: Each letter begins "I know (oida) your works" — Jesus addresses each church with precise, total knowledge of their internal spiritual state, their hidden sins, their private devotion. He knows what no human or angel could know about the internal condition of entire communities.
Colossians 2:3: "In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." All wisdom and knowledge — not some, not a great portion, but all — are contained in Jesus. This is an attribution of omniscience.
Matthew 28:20: "And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." Jesus promises perpetual universal presence to all his disciples — in every century, every country, every language. This is not a promise to send representatives or messages. "I am with you" — Jesus himself, continuously, universally present. The Greek "ego meth' hymōn eimi" is a present-tense divine promise of personal presence. A human being cannot be simultaneously present with 2.4 billion Christians across the globe at every moment.
Ephesians 1:23 + 4:10: Christ "fills all in all" and "ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things." The ascended Christ fills the entire created order — he is omnipresent in his glory. This is the divine attribute of omnipresence applied to Jesus by Paul.
Revelation 1:8: Jesus calls himself "the Almighty (ho pantokratōr)" — the same title used exclusively for YHWH throughout the OT (Amos 3:13, 4:13 LXX). Pantokratōr literally means "the one who holds all power." The NT's title for divine omnipotence — applied to Jesus.
Philippians 3:21: Jesus will "transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself." "Subject all things (ta panta) to himself" — Paul attributes the power of universal sovereignty to Jesus. Psalm 8:6 says God put all things under human feet. 1 Corinthians 15:27 applies this Psalm to Jesus — not as one subjected, but as the one doing the subjecting.
Hebrews quotes Psalm 102 to make the same point: Hebrews 1:11–12 quotes Psalm 102:26–27 about Jesus: "They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment... but you are the same, and your years will have no end." The creation changes and perishes. Jesus does not. He is the same through all changes — because he is the immutable divine being who underlies and sustains the changing creation.
John 1:1: "In the beginning was (ēn — imperfect: was already existing) the Word." Not "in the beginning the Word came into being" — that would require the aorist (egeneto). The imperfect ēn indicates the Word was already in existence at the point of creation's beginning. He pre-exists the beginning — which means he has no beginning. He is eternal.
Revelation 1:17–18: "I am the first and the last, and the living one." The living one (ho zōn) — the self-living, self-existent being. He does not receive life; he is life. This is eternality — existence that needs no external source because it is the ground of all existence.
Mark 13:32 — The Two-Natures Answer, As the Fathers Gave It
This is the strongest single verse for the objection, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a clever one. The honest reading is the one the church gave when the Arians pressed this exact verse in the fourth century: the eternal Son, having taken a real human nature (Philippians 2:7 — "he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant"), lived within the limits of that nature during his earthly life. What he does not know "as the Son" — in his genuine human mind — he knows "as God." His deity is untouched; his humanity is real. That is the doctrine of the two natures (defined at Chalcedon, 451), not a modern escape hatch.
Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians 3.42–46. Athanasius devotes a long passage to Mark 13:32. His argument: the one person of the Son can be spoken of according to either nature. "As, when He became man, He hungered and thirsted and suffered with men, so with men, as man, He knows not; though divinely, being in the Father the Word and Wisdom, He knows, and there is nothing which He knows not." The ignorance, he says, belongs to "the flesh" the Word assumed, "not to the Godhead."
Gregory of Nazianzus, Fourth Theological Oration (Oration 30.15). "He knows as God, and knows not as Man — if one may separate the visible from that which is discerned by thought alone." Gregory adds that "the absolute use of the Name, 'the Son,'" without qualification, is what tells us to attribute the not-knowing "to the Manhood, not to the Godhead."
Basil of Caesarea, Letter 236 (to Amphilochius), 1–2. Basil argues that the Son does know the day — "the Son knows the will of the Father, being the Father's Wisdom" — and that the verse refers "the first knowledge of things future to the Father, and through the Son to us." The Son has his knowledge from the Father as its source; the verse marks that order of cause, not a defect in the Son.
What the verse itself shows. The order is an ascending scale — not human beings, not the angels, not even the Son, but the Father. That sets the Son in a class next to the Father and above the whole angelic host; a merely human prophet would simply fall under "no one knows." Jesus also names himself "the Son" absolutely, over against "the Father" — a claim in itself. And after the resurrection the disciples ask the same question, and the glorified Christ still declines: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority" (Acts 1:7). The timing is reserved to the Father — which is about who declares the hour, not about a gap in the Son's knowledge.
Held together with the rest of the Gospels. The same Gospels have the disciples tell Jesus, "you know all things, and need no one to question you," and he does not correct them (John 16:30; cf. 21:17); "he knew what was in man" (John 2:25); "in him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3). Mark 13:32 does not overturn that; it belongs to the mystery of the incarnation — the eternal Son living a genuinely human life, and knowing, within that life, as the Father gave him to know.
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