Does Jesus Know When He Will Return? What Raises and Lowers the Odds
During his earthly ministry Jesus said he did not know the timing of his own return. Mark 13:32 records the saying with no manuscript dispute attached to it: "But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (English Standard Version). Matthew 24:36 carries the same words, though the phrase "nor the Son" is absent from a large body of Greek manuscripts and from the King James and New King James versions. Three explanations compete inside Christian tradition: that the ignorance belongs to Christ's human nature alone, that "does not know" means "was not sent to disclose," and that the Incarnation involved a genuine limitation of knowledge. All three arrive at the same practical result, and Acts 1:7 states it plainly after the resurrection — the date is not available to anyone who asks for it.
What Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32 actually say
The saying survives inside two parallel discourses. Matthew places it at 24:36, within the Olivet Discourse running from 24:3 to 25:46; Mark places it at 13:32, near the close of a shorter version running from 13:3 to 13:37. In both Gospels it functions as the ground of a command. Mark draws the inference in the very next verse, 13:33: "Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come."
English wording varies more than most readers expect, and the variation is doctrinal. Eight editions currently in print render Matthew 24:36 as follows.
| Translation | Edition | Wording of the key clause | "nor the Son" | |---|---|---|---| | King James Version | 1611 | "no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only" | Absent, no footnote | | New King James Version | 1982 | "not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only" | Absent; footnote reads "NU adds nor the Son" | | New International Version | 2011 | "not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" | Present, footnoted | | English Standard Version | 2016 | "not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only" | Present, footnoted | | New American Standard Bible | 1995 | "not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone" | Present | | Christian Standard Bible | 2017 | "neither the angels of heaven nor the Son—except the Father alone" | Present, footnoted | | New Living Translation | 2015 | "not even the angels in heaven or the Son himself" | Present, footnoted | | New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition | 2021 | "neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" | Present, footnoted |
The whole dispute concerns three Greek words: οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός. Every other clause in the verse is stable across the manuscript tradition.
Why some Bibles leave "nor the Son" out of Matthew
The phrase is missing from most surviving Greek copies of Matthew and present in most of the oldest ones. Translators are choosing between an early minority and a later majority.
The apparatus of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, 28th edition, lists the words as absent from Codex Regius, Codex Washingtonianus, the uncials Γ and Δ, manuscript family 1, the minuscules 22, 565, 579, 700, 892, 1241 and 1424, and the Byzantine majority text that stands behind the King James Version. They are present in Codex Vaticanus, Codex Bezae, Codex Koridethi and family 13. Codex Sinaiticus is the strangest witness of all: the original scribe wrote the phrase, a later hand deleted it, and a hand later still restored it. Three corrections, one verse.
Bruce M. Metzger — George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the scholar who wrote up the United Bible Societies committee's decisions — defended the longer reading in the second edition of A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (1994). His committee judged that "the omission of the words because of the doctrinal difficulty they present is more probable than their addition by assimilation to Mk 13.32." Bart Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, went further in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993), calling the variant one of the clearest examples of an orthodox change made to prevent a text's heretical misuse.
Daniel B. Wallace, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, argues the opposite. On his reading Matthew never wrote the phrase. Matthew adds μόνος, "alone," to Mark's wording, which already implies the Son's exclusion without stating it; and if nervous scribes were deleting the words for doctrinal comfort, it is hard to see why they left them standing untouched in Mark 13:32, where the statement is blunter. Wallace treats the shorter Matthean text as an authorial softening of Mark rather than a scribal one. The disagreement remains unresolved.
Does the same manuscript doubt affect Mark 13:32?
No. The ESV and NIV footnote Matthew 24:36 and print Mark 13:32 with no note on the phrase at all, because the words stand in effectively the entire manuscript tradition there. Metzger and Wallace, flatly opposed on Matthew, agree on Mark. That fact governs everything downstream: whichever way Matthew 24:36 is decided, a saying in which Jesus places himself among those who do not know the day survives in the New Testament. Wallace's argument, if correct, removes a phrase from one Gospel and leaves the theological problem where it stood.
How the councils and catechisms answered the problem
They answered by distinguishing what Christ knows as God from what he knows as man, and by reading "does not know" as a statement about disclosure.
Gregory of Nazianzus took up the verse around 380 in Oration 30, the Fourth Theological Oration, answering opponents who used it to deny Christ's divinity. He pressed them on the absurdity of a Son who knows accurately everything preceding the last hour while remaining ignorant of the hour itself, comparing it to a man who knows everything in front of a wall but not the wall. His conclusion is the sentence the later tradition kept quoting: the Son "knows as God, and knows not as Man." Gregory also noted that the text says "the Son" absolutely, without specifying whose Son, which he took as licence to refer the ignorance to the manhood.
The Council of Chalcedon supplied the grammar for that move. Meeting from 8 October to 1 November 451, the council adopted its Definition at the fifth session on 22 October, confessing one Christ known in two natures "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." The Athanasian Creed states the consequence at verse 33: "Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood." Despite its name the creed is not the work of Athanasius, who died in 373; modern scholarship dates it to Latin southern Gaul in the late fifth or early sixth century.
The boundary was tested in the sixth century by the Agnoetae, followers of Themistius, a deacon of Alexandria, who taught that Christ's human knowledge was genuinely limited and cited Mark 13:32 alongside John 11:34, where Jesus asks where Lazarus has been laid. Most Monophysites rejected the position and the orthodox condemned it. Sophronius of Jerusalem anathematised Themistius; Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria from roughly 580 to 608, wrote a treatise against the group; and Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604, endorsed that treatise in Book X, Letter 39 of his Registrum Epistolarum, finding in it much to admire and nothing to displease. The Third Council of Constantinople in 681 completed the framework by confessing two wills and two natural operations in Christ, a decision recorded at paragraph 475 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The Catechism's own answer sits one paragraph earlier. Paragraph 474, promulgated in 1992, reads: "By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal. What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal." Footnote 109 to that sentence cites Mark 13:32 and Acts 1:7 together.
A fourth position developed outside that consensus. Kenotic theology, worked out by Gottfried Thomasius in Christi Person und Werk between 1853 and 1861 and carried into English by Charles Gore's Bampton Lectures of 1891, The Incarnation of the Son of God, takes the ignorance as real rather than reserved. On this account the Son accepted an actual restriction of knowledge in becoming human.
Matthew and Mark versus Acts 1:7: does anything change after the resurrection?
The wording changes. Whether the knowledge changed is disputed, and no text settles it.
Mark 13:32 lists the Son among those who do not know. Acts 1:7 belongs to a scene after the resurrection, days before the ascension, and the sentence is built differently: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority." The Greek phrase is χρόνους ἢ καιρούς. Jesus restricts the apostles' access and does not repeat the earlier disclaimer about himself. The disciples had asked whether he would now restore the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1:6); the answer redirects them to the mission described in 1:8.
Interpreters split into two camps on that silence. The first reads the exaltation as decisive, pointing to Matthew 28:18, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," and to the change in grammatical subject at Acts 1:7. The second holds that Acts 1:7 answers a question about the disciples and reports nothing about Christ's knowledge, which makes the inference an argument from silence.
Revelation 1:1 complicates both positions rather than resolving them. The book opens: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place." Interpreters divide over whether "gave" describes the commissioning of a message or the supply of information. The Catechism's footnote weighs against any change of state, since in citing Mark 13:32 and Acts 1:7 as a single category it treats the two statements as continuous.
Chalcedon's definition constrains the whole argument by requiring both natures to be complete, which rules out solving the puzzle by thinning the humanity or qualifying the divinity. Every orthodox answer has to locate the ignorance somewhere specific: in the human nature, in the economy of revelation, or in a self-limitation freely accepted.
What lowers the odds that anyone can date the return
Two popular arguments used to move the date closer collapse when their sources are checked.
The first is the "seven signs" framework. No biblical text numbers seven signs preceding the return. Matthew 24 runs as a discourse, listing deception and false messiahs (24:4-5), wars and rumours of wars (24:6-7), famines and earthquakes (24:7), persecution and false prophets (24:9-11), lawlessness (24:12) and worldwide preaching (24:14) without ever counting them, and Jesus calls the whole sequence "the beginning of the birth pains" (24:8). Revelation's sevens are seals, trumpets and bowls, which are judgments inside the end rather than warnings before it. The one genuinely numbered set of seven signs in the New Testament is the miracle sequence in John's Gospel, unrelated to the return. Ministries publishing "seven signs" lists do not agree on the contents; Tomorrow's World runs a seven-sign article and also distributes a booklet titled Fourteen Signs Announcing Christ's Return. The number is editorial.
The second is the ancient Jewish wedding argument, which holds that a bridegroom could not name his own return date because his father alone decided when the bridal chamber was finished. Rabbinic marriage law is documented in unusual detail, and the rule is not in it. Mishnah Ketubot 5:2 gives a first-time bride twelve months to prepare once marriage has been requested, thirty days for a widow, and the same period to the man; the Gemara derives the twelve months at Ketubot 57a. The tractates governing betrothal and marriage assign the timing to the couple's demand and the preparation window, with no provision for a father withholding it, and proponents asked to produce an ancient source have not done so.
What remains after both arguments are set aside is the shape of the texts. Mark 13:33 gives a command rather than a calendar, and the Catechism, the Athanasian Creed and Chalcedon all decline to say anything about the date while spending considerable effort on the natures of the one who withholds it.
Frequently asked questions
Does anyone know when Jesus will return?
No. Mark 13:32 places the day and hour with the Father alone, excluding angels and the Son during Jesus' earthly ministry. Acts 1:7 repeats the restriction to the apostles after the resurrection. No Christian creed, catechism or council has ever claimed access to the date, and every published prediction so far has failed.
What are the seven signs before Jesus returns?
Scripture nowhere numbers seven signs. Matthew 24 lists deception, wars, famines, earthquakes, persecution, apostasy and worldwide preaching without counting them, calling the events "the beginning of the birth pains" (24:8). Revelation's sevens are seals, trumpets and bowls, which are judgments inside the end, not warnings before it. Published lists disagree with each other.
Did Jesus tell us when he will return?
No. In Matthew 24 and Mark 13 he described conditions preceding the end and then withheld the timing, attaching a command to stay alert instead (Mark 13:33). After the resurrection he told the apostles in Acts 1:7 that the times and seasons were fixed by the Father's own authority and were not theirs to know.
Why did Jesus not know when he would return?
Historic Christian answers differ. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing around 380, held that Christ "knows as God, and knows not as Man." The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 474, says he was not sent to reveal it. Kenotic theologians such as Charles Gore, in 1891, argued the limitation was real.
Does Jesus know when he is coming back according to Scripture?
Scripture states directly only what was true during his ministry: Mark 13:32 excludes the Son from knowing the day and hour. No later text says he came to know it. Acts 1:7 restricts the apostles without mentioning himself, and interpreters divide over whether that silence signals a change.
Why does only the Father know the hour?
Mark 13:32 and Acts 1:7 both assign the timing to the Father's own authority. Chalcedon in 451 defined Christ as one person in two natures, allowing theologians to say the Son knows as God while the human nature does not. The Athanasian Creed, verse 33, states the same distinction.
How do traditions explain Christ’s knowledge?
Three explanations dominate. Dual predication, formalised at Chalcedon in 451, assigns knowledge to the divine nature and ignorance to the human. The reserve reading, stated at paragraph 474 of the Catechism, treats "does not know" as "not sent to reveal." Kenotic theology, developed from the 1850s, accepts a real limitation.