Passage

Matthew 24.36

Book: Matthew · ASV / WEB / KJV / YLT

Immediate context (±2 verses)

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Setting

• Speaker: Jesus
• Audience: The disciples, privately
• Location: The Mount of Olives, opposite the temple
• Time period: Passion week, during the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24-25)

The Christological problem

The verse is the sharpest single text in the New Testament against a simple account of the incarnation, and it is used from two directions: by unitarian and Muslim interlocutors to show that Jesus is not God, and by critics to show that the gospels contradict later orthodoxy.

The difficulty is exact. If the Son is omniscient, he knows the day and hour. The verse says he does not. Adding "nor the Son" makes it explicit rather than inferred.

The textual note first. The phrase oude ho huios is firmly present in Mark 13:32 and is absent from a portion of the Matthean manuscript tradition, which is why some older English versions omit it here. The direction of scribal pressure is obvious and settles the question of which reading is original: a copyist has every motive to remove a clause that appears to limit Christ's knowledge and no motive at all to insert one. The harder reading is original, and the clause belongs in Matthew.

Theological reading

The Chalcedonian answer: predication by way of a nature. The classical position is that the one person of Christ possesses two natures, divine and human, and that statements about him are true by way of one nature or the other. He is omniscient as God and grows in wisdom as man (Luke 2:52). The ignorance predicated here belongs to the human nature, which is a genuine created human intellect and not a divine mind wearing a body.

The test of whether this is special pleading is whether the same move is applied consistently elsewhere, and it is. Nobody concludes from Luke 3:23 that God was thirty years old, or from John 4:6 that God gets tired, or from John 11:35 that God has tear ducts. Every reader instinctively assigns those to the humanity. Matthew 24:36 is the same operation applied to a property that feels more theologically loaded, and the discomfort is about the property rather than about the logic. The developed treatment is at Jesus Ate Food Therefore Contingent Objection Defeater, which answers the structurally identical objection from hunger.

What the verse itself signals. The sequence is deliberate: not the angels, nor the Son, but the Father only. Placing the Son above the angels in an ascending scale is not the sentence of someone diminishing him. He is ranked in a series whose top term is the Father and whose comparison class is the angelic host, which is a remarkable position for a Galilean teacher to claim in passing while making a statement about his own limits.

The patristic engagement. The clause was the centre of a real controversy. The Arians pressed it as evidence that the Son is a creature; the fourth-century response, developed by Athanasius and by Gregory of Nazianzus, was that Christ speaks the ignorance as man, and Gregory adds that the Son knows as God what he does not know as man. Augustine offers a further reading, that the idiom means the Son does not know it in the sense of not making it known, comparing the Hebrew idiom in Genesis 22:12; this is a minority solution and the two-natures answer is the mainstream one.

The economic point. The Olivet Discourse's purpose is not to supply a timetable but to remove one. The whole passage from verse 36 forward is a call to readiness precisely because the time is not disclosed, illustrated by Noah's contemporaries, the thief in the night, and the servants awaiting a master's return. A verse that withholds the date is doing pastoral work, and reading it primarily as a Christological embarrassment inverts its function.

Notes

Three practical points for using this text.

Concede the difficulty rather than minimising it. It is a real problem for anyone who thinks the incarnation means a divine mind operating a human body, and the concession costs nothing, because that view is a heresy the church condemned rather than a position to defend.

Run the consistency test out loud. Ask the interlocutor whether he concludes from Luke 2:52 that God grew in wisdom, or from John 4:6 that God was tired. He will assign those to the humanity without hesitation, and then the question is why this property alone should be handled differently.

Do not lead with Augustine's idiom reading. It sounds evasive to a modern ear and is not the tradition's main answer; keep it in reserve as a secondary note.

See Christology for the doctrinal frame and Son of Man Title for the adjacent question of what Jesus claimed about himself.

Key words

Theologically-loaded Greek or Hebrew words in this verse may have entries in the lexicon. Curated to roughly 100 contested terms across the corpus, not every word; see Lexicon Roadmap.

• G3962 - pater, pater, Strong's G3962
• G1492 - oida, oida, Strong's G1492

Quoted in

Arguments and defeaters:

• Failed Second Coming Prophecy Objection Defeater
• Jesus Didnt Know the Hour Objection Defeater

Concepts:

• Eschatology
• Father-Son Authority Asymmetry
• Jesus Said, via Matthew 24
• Rapture Timing Comparison
• Trinity Common Objections
• Two-Stage Messianic Prophecy

Lexicon:

• G1492 - oida

Passages:

• Acts 1.7

Why these four translations

ris3n chose ASV, WEB, KJV, and YLT for two reasons together. They are the most literal English translations available (formal-equivalence: word-for-word renderings that preserve the Hebrew and Greek grammar rather than smoothing it into modern dynamic-equivalence idiom). And they are in the public domain in the United States, which means fair-use quotation at any length requires no publisher license. Modern licensed translations (NASB95, ESV, NIV) restrict volume of quotation under their copyright terms, so they are not used at stub-level coverage here. NASB95 appears only on hand-curated rich passage hubs under Lockman Foundation's fair-use allowance.

The four:

• ASV (American Standard Version, 1901). The basis of the modern critical-text English tradition.
• WEB (World English Bible, contemporary). Public-domain revision in the ASV line, in current English.
• KJV (King James Version, 1611). Reformation-era, Textus Receptus base.
• YLT (Young's Literal Translation, Robert Young, 1862). Hyper-literal preservation of Hebrew and Greek grammar; useful for word-study work even where English reads stiff.

See Bibles for the full per-translation history, translators, textual basis, strengths, and weaknesses.