Jesus did not know the day or hour

Some Christian answers to this verse sound evasive, and you are right to distrust them. Mark 13:32 is in the Gospel usually dated earliest, and Matthew includes it too. Christians copied it, read it aloud in worship, and argued about it for centuries. If the church had wanted to remove inconvenient words, these would have been a natural candidate. They are still there.

There is common ground on the subject of the verse itself. The Qur’an teaches that the knowledge of the Hour is with God alone (for example, 7:187 and 31:34). Jesus in Mark says the same about the day of the end: it belongs to the Father. On that point, the Gospel and the Qur’an agree.

This is a hard verse for Christians. A doctrine that has kept it in its own Scriptures and worked to understand it should at least be heard on what it claims.

The argument goes: God knows everything; Jesus did not know something; so Jesus is not God. That would be decisive against a belief that Jesus was God appearing in human form without a real human life. Christians rejected that belief very early.

What Christians teach is called the incarnation, from the Latin for “made flesh”: the belief that the eternal Word of God took on a complete human life, body and mind, without ceasing to be what he was. Whatever you think of that claim, it is what Christianity is committed to, and it includes real human limits. Luke’s Gospel says that as a boy “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). The Gospels show him hungry, tired, grieving, and praying. A human mind that grows also has things it does not yet know.

Paul, writing around AD 60, describes this as a deliberate humbling: the one who existed “in the form of God” took “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-11). Christians read Mark 13:32 inside that picture. The Son, living a true human life in obedience to the Father, speaks from within that life.

You may think that combination is impossible. That is a serious objection, and a separate one. Mark 13:32 does not refute the Christian claim; it describes part of it.

Look at the order of the verse: no one knows, “not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” The sentence climbs. Angels are high; the Son is higher; the Father alone knows. Jesus puts himself above the angels and next to the Father, and he calls himself “the Son,” with no other qualification, in the same breath as “the Father.”

A word about that title. When Christians call Jesus the Son of God, they do not mean that God took a wife and had a child. Christians reject that idea as firmly as Muslims do. The title names a relationship: the one who comes from the Father, shares his nature, and makes him known.

Whatever you conclude about who Jesus is, the verse that says the Son does not know the day also gives him a rank no prophet or angel is given in it. Using the first half of the sentence while setting aside the second does not do the verse justice.

Mark 13:32 ends a long speech about the end of the age, and the sentences before it matter. Jesus says the Son of Man will come “in the clouds with great power and glory” and send out the angels to gather God’s chosen people from the ends of the earth (Mark 13:26-27). This draws on Daniel’s vision of “one like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven,” who receives an everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:13-14).

Then, one sentence before the verse about the day and hour, Jesus says: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away” (Mark 13:31). The prophet Isaiah had said: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8). In Isaiah it is God’s word that outlasts creation. Here Jesus says it of his own words.

If Mark is good evidence for what Jesus said in verse 32, it is equally good evidence for verse 31. Read together, the passage gives a Jesus who does not know the day, who commands the angels, and whose words outlast heaven and earth. Christians did not invent that combination to escape the verse; it comes from the verse’s own paragraph.

Mark 13:32 does not disprove the Christian belief about Jesus, because that belief already holds that he lived a real human life with real limits. It does not prove the Christian belief either. Whether Jesus is more than a prophet depends on the whole of the earliest evidence, not on one verse.

That evidence is worth a look. Historians of early Christianity, including Larry Hurtado in Lord Jesus Christ, have shown that Jesus’ first followers, Jews who prayed to the one God of Israel, were already praying to and honoring Jesus within a few years of his death. Richard Bauckham argues in Jesus and the God of Israel that they did this not by adding a second god, which they would have rejected as you do, but by including Jesus within the identity of the one God. You may judge that they were wrong. It is a different question from the one this verse raises, and it is taken up at Jesus is God.