The "Human Limitation" Passages — Mark 8, the Fig Tree, "Not Even the Son", Gethsemane, Hebrews 5:7

The historic Christian claim is not "Jesus is God and only seems human." It is that the eternal Son took a complete human nature — body and rational human soul — without ceasing to be divine (the Definition of Chalcedon, AD 451). He is one person acting through two natures. Hunger, tiredness, growth in knowledge, grief, prayer, and death belong truly to him in his humanity; omniscience, omnipresence, and the power to raise himself belong to him in his deity.

Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 380), Oration 29.18: lays down the rule the Fathers used for reading every such text — "Apply the more lofty expressions to the Godhead… and the lowlier ones to the compound, to Him who because of you was emptied and made flesh… He hungered, but He fed thousands… He was wearied, but He is the rest of the weary… He prays, but He hears prayer."

The Tome of Leo (AD 449): "Each nature performs what is proper to it in communion with the other: the Word does what belongs to the Word, and the flesh carries out what belongs to the flesh."

Athanasius (c. 340), Against the Arians 3.29–34: the Word, impassible in his own nature, "appropriated" the weakness of the flesh he took, so that in him our weakness might be healed — "what he prayed for as man, he himself gave as God."

Modern scholarship on this framework: the point is developed at length by Stephen Wellum, God the Son Incarnate (2016); Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?; Oliver Crisp, Divinity and Humanity; and, for the New Testament data specifically, Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (2008), and Simon Gathercole, The Preexistent Son (2006). None of these texts was an embarrassment the Fathers tried to hide — they built their doctrine out of them.

Jesus spits on the man's eyes and lays hands on him; the man sees "people… like trees, walking"; Jesus touches him a second time and only then is his sight clear. A divine being, it is argued, would heal instantly with a single word, not by a progressive, iterative process.

(a) Jesus heals instantly with a word constantly. "Be clean" (Mark 1:41); "Rise, take up your bed" (2:11); "Stretch out your hand" (3:5); "Talitha koum" (5:41); "Ephphatha" (7:34); "Go your way; your faith has made you well" — and Bartimaeus "immediately recovered his sight" (10:52). If Mark thought a two-stage healing showed weakness, he would not have surrounded it with instant ones. The variation of method (word, touch, spittle, mud, distance) makes the point that the power is personal and free, exercised exactly as the Healer chooses — not a mechanical force that always works the same way.

(b) It is a deliberately placed acted parable. Mark frames this healing with two units about the disciples' blindness. Just before it, Jesus rebukes them: "Do you not yet perceive or understand?… Having eyes do you not see?" (8:17–21). Just after it, Peter half-sees — "You are the Christ" (8:29) — and then, when Jesus speaks of the cross, Peter rebukes him and is called "Satan" (8:32–33). Peter has genuine but blurred sight; he needs a "second touch," which comes only after the resurrection. The two-stage healing is Mark's picture of discipleship: real sight given gradually. This is a literary and theological design, not a failure of power. (So R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC 2002; Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8, Anchor Yale; Morna Hooker, The Gospel According to St Mark, BNTC — all read 8:22–26 as the hinge of the section, matched with blind Bartimaeus at 10:46–52 who, healed, "followed him on the way.")

(c) The Fathers read it exactly this way. Bede (c. 720), Exposition of Mark: "He who could have restored sight with a word chose to do it by degrees, to show how great the man's blindness had been, and that the light of spiritual knowledge is given to us step by step, not all at once." Jerome and the catena tradition (Victor of Antioch on Mark) read the "men as trees" stage as the imperfect faith that still needs perfecting.

The Old Testament link — a divine-arrival sign. The opening of blind eyes is, in Isaiah, a sign that God himself has come: "Behold your God will come… then the eyes of the blind shall be opened" (Isaiah 35:4–5); the Servant is given "to open the eyes that are blind" (42:7) and "I will lead the blind in a way they do not know" (42:16); "in that day the deaf shall hear… and the eyes of the blind shall see" (29:18). When John the Baptist asks "are you the one who is to come?" Jesus answers by pointing to exactly these signs: "the blind receive their sight…" (Matthew 11:5). The spittle also carries an echo: the Word who formed the first man from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7) stoops and works with clay and spittle again. Irenaeus makes this connection on the parallel healing in John 9: "that which the artificer, the Word, had passed over in the forming in the womb, He then supplied openly, that the works of God might be made manifest in him" (Against Heresies 5.15.2). The method that looks undignified is the Creator re-forming his creature.

Jesus feels "power had gone out from him" and asks who touched him, as if he were a passive vessel through which divine power flowed independently of his own will — not the conscious source of the power himself.

(a) The text says the power was his own. "Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him" (5:30). It comes out of him; he is the source, not a conduit from somewhere else. And it is under his command elsewhere: at Nazareth "he could do no mighty work there… because of their unbelief" (6:5–6) — not inability but a deliberate withholding; he heals the centurion's servant at a distance by a word (Matthew 8:13); he raises Lazarus after praying aloud "for the sake of the people standing around, that they may believe" (John 11:42).

(b) The question is pastoral, not a confession of ignorance. "He looked around to see who had done it" (5:32) — he keeps looking; he is waiting. He wants the woman, who touched him secretly out of shame and fear, to come out into the open, so that a furtive contact becomes a face-to-face relationship: "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace." He turns a stolen healing into a public testimony and a restored place in the community.

The Fathers on the question: Ambrose (c. 389), Exposition of the Gospel of Luke 6.56–58: "He asked, not because He did not know, but that He might make her faith known and reward her confession." John Chrysostom, Homily 31 on Matthew: "He asked, not being ignorant… but to bring her into the midst and proclaim her faith, and to free her from fear, lest her conscience should sting her as one who had stolen the gift." Peter Chrysologus (Sermons 33–36) and Augustine (Sermon 62) say the same: "the Lord knew; He asked that she might be revealed."

The Old Testament link — Leviticus reversed, Malachi fulfilled. A twelve-year discharge of blood made the woman permanently ceremonially unclean; under Leviticus 15:25–27 her touch would transmit that uncleanness to Jesus. Instead the current runs the other way: his purity and power flow out and heal her. The Law's logic is reversed by the one who is greater than the Law. And Matthew's version notes she touched "the fringe (Greek kraspedon) of his garment" (Matthew 9:20) — the tzitzit, the tassel Israelites were commanded to wear on the corners (Hebrew kanaph, "wing/corner/edge") of their garments (Numbers 15:38–39). Malachi had promised: "For you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings (kanaph)" (Malachi 4:2). The woman reaches for the "wings" of the Sun of Righteousness — and finds the healing that was promised there. (The tzitzit/kraspedon and Malachi 4:2 link is noted by Craig Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, and R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT.) Mark also intercalates this story inside the raising of Jairus's daughter: two "daughters," one bleeding twelve years, one twelve years old — faith that touches, over against the mourners who "laughed at him."

Jesus looks for fruit on a fig tree "out of season," finds none, and curses it so that it withers — supposedly proof that he lacked omniscience, since he did not know the tree was barren until he inspected it.

(a) It is a prophetic sign-act, and Mark tells us so. Old Testament prophets regularly performed acted parables — Jeremiah smashing a jar (Jeremiah 19), Ezekiel lying on his side and building a model siege (Ezekiel 4), Hosea's marriage (Hosea 1). Mark wraps the fig tree around the cleansing of the temple (11:15–19): a tree "in leaf" (looking alive) but with no fruit is the temple — busy, impressive, and spiritually empty; the withering "to its roots" (11:20) is the judgment Jesus then predicts explicitly: "there will not be left here one stone upon another" (13:2), fulfilled in AD 70.

(b) "It was not the season for figs" (11:13) is the interpretive key. Mark inserts that line so no reader thinks this is a hungry man losing his temper. In that region a fig tree in full leaf by Passover would normally carry taqsh / early green figs (Hebrew paggim) alongside the leaves; leaves without any early fruit is a tree that advertises fruit it does not have — profession without substance. (So France, Mark, NIGTC; and the standard monograph, William Telford, The Barren Temple and the Withered Tree, 1980, which established that the episode is a coordinated prophetic sign against the temple.)

(c) Jesus' knowledge of the near future is precise, not deficient. He foretells his betrayal, the manner of his death, Peter's three denials before the cock crows twice, the destruction of the temple, and the scattering of the disciples "this very night." The fig tree "seeing whether he could find anything on it" is narrative staging for an enacted parable — the way a prophet "looks" at a sign.

The Fathers: John Chrysostom, Homily 67 on Matthew: "He did it… to instruct the disciples… showing that He was able to wither the Jews also; but He would not do it upon men — He did it upon the plant." Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 2.68 and Sermon 89: "the tree had leaves and no fruit — words without deeds"; and Christ "hungering" for its fruit is his hunger for faith. Victor of Antioch (the earliest Greek commentary on Mark) reads the tree as the synagogue, condemned for fruitlessness. Ephrem the Syrian (Commentary on the Diatessaron) says Jesus "cursed the tree that was without fruit, as a symbol of Jerusalem, which was without righteousness."

The Old Testament link — Jesus is quoting the prophets. The fig tree is a stock image for Israel under judgment: "there are no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered" (Jeremiah 8:13); "Woe is me!… there is no cluster to eat, no first-ripe fig that my soul desires" (Micah 7:1); "Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel… but they came to Baal-peor" (Hosea 9:10); "he has laid waste my vine and splintered my fig tree" (Joel 1:7). Jesus, coming to the temple hungry and finding only leaves, is enacting Micah 7:1 — "no first-ripe fig that my soul desires" — and Jeremiah 8:13. His own parable of the vineyard (Isaiah 5) and of the barren fig tree given one last year (Luke 13:6–9) say the same thing in words. The "hidden meaning" is that the Lord comes seeking covenant fruit in his own house, in the very language of the prophets, and finds it barren.

"Concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only." Cited as direct textual proof that Jesus did not possess divine omniscience.

(a) The same Gospels affirm that Jesus knows all things. "Now we know that you know all things" — and Jesus does not correct it (John 16:30); "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you" (John 21:17); "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3). Yet "Jesus increased in wisdom" as a child (Luke 2:52). Both are true because he has two natures. What he does not know "as the Son" — that is, in the experience of his genuine human mind — he knows "as God."

(b) The verse elevates the Son, it does not demote him. The order is an ascending scale: not human beings, not the angels, not even the Son — only the Father. A merely human prophet would simply be part of "no one knows." Instead the Son is singled out in a class next to the Father, and he calls himself "the Son" absolutely — a claim in itself.

(c) A "reserved" knowledge, not an absent one. After the resurrection the disciples ask him the same question, and he answers: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority" (Acts 1:7). The risen, glorified Christ still declines to tell them — clearly not because he is ignorant, but because it is not to be revealed. Several Fathers read Mark 13:32 the same way: he "knows not" in the sense of "is not commissioned to make it known."

The Fathers: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.15: "He knows as God, and knows not as man… the Son knows the hour, but as bearing our ignorance in the flesh, that he might sanctify our ignorance too." Basil of Caesarea, Letter 236: "the knowledge of the Son comes from the Father… the ignorance is to be referred to the humanity, not the deity." Athanasius, Against the Arians 3.42–50: the Word who knows the Father knows all things; the "not knowing" belongs to the flesh he assumed. Augustine, On the Trinity 1.12.23: "he is said not to know what he causes his disciples not to know — that is, what he did not so know as to make known to them at that time." John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 3.21–22 gives a full account of "progress" and "ignorance" in Christ according to the humanity.

The Old Testament link. "The day and the hour" is the language of "the Day of the LORD" (Amos 5:18–20; Joel 2:1; Zephaniah 1:14–18). In Zechariah 14:7 that day is "known to the LORD" alone — only YHWH knows it. Daniel is told to "shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end" (Daniel 12:9). Reticence about the exact time is a fixed feature of Old Testament eschatology. Jesus stands in that tradition — and names the Father as the one who has fixed it "by his own authority" (Acts 1:7), the very role Zechariah 14:7 gives to YHWH.

Scholarship: even sceptical critics accept this saying as authentic precisely because the early church would not have invented an admission that Jesus did not know something (the "criterion of embarrassment" — so Bart Ehrman, The New Testament, and R. T. France, who then reads it through the real two-natures limitation). Note also a text-critical point: some manuscripts of Matthew 24:36 drop "nor the Son" (assimilating to a smoother reading); the harder reading, with "nor the Son," is judged original (Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament).

Jesus falls to the ground in prayer, and "an angel from heaven appeared to him, strengthening him" — used to argue that an all-powerful God would not need angelic reinforcement.

(a) A text-critical note first. Luke 22:43–44 (the angel and the sweat "like great drops of blood") is missing from several of the earliest and best manuscripts (P75, Codex Vaticanus, the original hand of Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Washingtonianus) and present in others, and is quoted already by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Hippolytus in the 2nd century. Its originality is genuinely debated. Bruce Metzger's committee bracketed it as "an early addition"; Bart Ehrman and Mark Plunkett ("The Angel and the Agony," CBQ 1983) argued the opposite — that scribes uncomfortable with a distressed Christ removed it — so that it may well be original to Luke. Either way, the theology below is standard.

(b) The angel adds comfort, not power. Angels had ministered to Jesus after the temptation (Mark 1:13; Matthew 4:11). In the garden Jesus himself says he could at that moment call on "more than twelve legions of angels" (Matthew 26:53) — and refuses. He is not a God who needs angelic help; he is the incarnate Son who, in real human anguish, receives the Father's care in the form the Father sends. Hebrews makes this the point of the whole passion: he was made "like his brothers in every respect… he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted" (Hebrews 2:17–18).

The Fathers: Ambrose, Exposition of Luke 10.56–62: "He grieved for me, who had nothing to grieve for on His own account… He took on my sadness, that He might confer on me His gladness." Epiphanius (Ancoratus 31) defends the verse against those in his own day who cut it out to protect Christ's dignity — insisting it proves the reality of the incarnation. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 103 cites "his sweat fell down like drops of blood" as the fulfilment of prophecy that the Messiah would be a suffering man. John of Damascus 3.24 ("On the Prayer of the Lord"): the agony and the prayer belong to the human will, which the Son made his own and freely brought into line with the Father's — "not my will, but yours be done."

The Old Testament link. An angel strengthening a servant of God on the way is a scene the Old Testament already sets up. In 1 Kings 19:5–8 an angel comes to Elijah under the broom tree — the prophet wanting to die — and gives him food "for the journey is too great for you," and he goes forty days to the mountain of God. In Daniel 10:18–19 "one having the appearance of a man touched me and strengthened me, and said, 'O man greatly loved, fear not, peace be with you; be strong and of good courage.'" The Greek verb Luke uses for "strengthening" (enischyō) is the same word the Septuagint uses in those passages. And the prayer itself is the Psalter's: "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death" echoes Psalm 42–43 ("Why are you cast down, O my soul?"); "the snares of death encompassed me; I suffered distress and anguish" is Psalm 116:3. Jesus in the garden is walking the road of Elijah and the psalmists — but he is the one they were pointing toward. (The Elijah echo: I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, NIGTC; Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, vol. 1.)

"In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence." Cited as evidence that Jesus prayed to a higher power for his own preservation.

(a) Read the verse in its argument. Hebrews 5:1–10 is explaining why Jesus qualifies as high priest: a priest must be able "to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness" (5:2). Jesus meets that requirement not by sinning but by fully sharing the human condition — "in the days of his flesh," in Gethsemane, with real cries and tears. "He was heard" — not by escaping death (he died), but by being brought through death: "being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation" (5:9). "The one able to save him from death" is the Father who raises the dead — the same power Abraham trusted (Hebrews 11:19).

(b) The same letter calls the Son God. Hebrews 1 says the Son is the one "through whom he created the world," "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature" (1:2–3); God addresses him, "Your throne, O God, is forever" (1:8, quoting Psalm 45); and "You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth" (1:10, quoting Psalm 102 — a psalm about YHWH). Hebrews holds both together deliberately: the Son is fully God, and the Son "learned obedience through what he suffered" (5:8) in his flesh. That is the letter's whole point — a high priest who is God and who is also truly one of us.

The Fathers: John Chrysostom, Homily 8 on Hebrews: "He prayed… to teach us to be earnest in prayer, and to show that He was truly clothed with flesh." Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentary on Hebrews: "He was heard — in that He rose again." Cyril of Alexandria (That Christ Is One): the prayers are proper to the humanity the Word made his own. Athanasius, Against the Arians 3.55–57: the Word, impassible in himself, truly prays and truly suffers in the flesh he took, "appropriating" our condition to heal it.

The Old Testament link. "Loud cries and tears… and he was heard" is the vocabulary of the lament psalms of the righteous sufferer who is vindicated: "he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him" (Psalm 22:24); "I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice… the snares of death encompassed me… you have delivered my soul from death" (Psalm 116:1–8); "in my distress I called upon the LORD… he heard my voice" (Psalm 18:6); "Into your hand I commit my spirit" (Psalm 31:5, which Jesus prays from the cross). Hebrews is reading the passion through the Psalter's pattern — the one who cries out is heard, and raised. (So William Lane, Hebrews, WBC; Harold Attridge, Hebrews, Hermeneia — "heard out of his fear," i.e. delivered from death by resurrection. On Hebrews' high Christology: Richard Bauckham, "The Divinity of Jesus Christ in the Epistle to the Hebrews.")

A man calls him "Good Teacher"; Jesus replies, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone" — supposedly a disclaimer of divine goodness and authority, subordinating himself to the Creator.

Jesus does not deny that he is good; he challenges a cheap use of the word. He does not say, "Do not call me good, for I am not good." He presses the man: do you realise what you are saying? He states a premise — "no one is good but God alone" — and the Gospels supply the other one: Jesus is good and sinless ("Which one of you convicts me of sin?", John 8:46; "he committed no sin," 1 Peter 2:22; "one who has been tempted as we are, yet without sin," Hebrews 4:15; "he made him to be sin who knew no sin," 2 Corinthians 5:21). Follow the logic and it points to his deity, not away from it. Matthew's wording sharpens it: "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good" (Matthew 19:17) — the issue is the man's shallow flattery and his idea that eternal life can be earned by doing one more "good thing."

The Fathers: Ambrose, Exposition of Luke 8.66: "He does not deny that He is good; He recalls the man to a true understanding — that goodness is of God, and He is God." Basil and Bede read it the same way: a rebuke to superficial address, and an invitation to draw the conclusion.

The Old Testament link. "The LORD is good" is a refrain of Israel's worship: "Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good" (Psalm 34:8); "For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever" (Psalm 100:5); "Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good" (Psalm 118:1, 29; 106:1; 107:1); "The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble" (Nahum 1:7). Jesus points the man straight to that confession — and then stands before him as its object.

This passage has a fuller treatment in "Why Do You Call Me Good? Only God Is Good" — see the related section below.