Mark 13:32 (cf. Matt
24:36) has the person (not the “human
nature” merely) of Jesus proclaim that he did not know the date of the parousia (his coming in glory), and such knowledge was known to the person of the Father alone. This has long been a problematic passage for Trinitarian Christologies, especially the Hypostatic Union, and has resulted in many functionally splitting Jesus into two persons (a form of Nestorianism). I have discussed this, for instance, in my article Latter-day Saints have Chosen the True, Biblical Jesus.
Joseph Pohle, a leading early 20th-century Catholic theologian and apologist, wrote the following about the various ways Trinitarians have approached this issue which should be of interest to Latter-day Saints who interact with Trinitarian apologists:
The Fathers differed in their interpretation of Mark XIII, 32: “But of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.”
As long as it was necessary to combat the Arian heresy that the Logos was subject to “ignorance” because He was a creature, the Fathers confined themselves to defending Christ’s divine nature against the charge of ignorance, and some passages in their writings create the impression that they did it at the expense of His sacred humanity. Leontius Byzantinus in his controversies with the Agnoetae went so far as to admit that the testimony of the earlier Fathers was practically worthless in consequence of their having made this mistake. Eulogius excused them on the plea that “If sundry Fathers have admitted ignorance in the humanity of our Saviour, they have not set it down as an article of faith but [made this admission] merely to reject the folly of the Arians, who shifted all human attributes to that Divinity in order to prove that the Divine Logos is a creature.” Petavius takes a similar view, while Suarez, Kleutgen, and Stentrup, vigorously defend the orthodoxy of the early Fathers.
Some of the Fathers explain Mark XIII, 32 in a mystic sense referring Christ’s “ignorance” to His mystic body, i.e., the Church. Others hold that when Christ said he did not know the day of judgment, He meant that He had no knowledge which He was free to communicate (Scientia communicabilis), nor any knowledge derived from His human intellect, abstracting from the Hypostatic Union. Of these three interpretations the second and theirs are simple and natural, whereas the first strikes one as factitious. It is perfectly consonant with the economy of salvation as proclaimed by our Lord on other occasions, that the determination of the time of the last judgment should be reserved to the official sphere of the Father, and that the Son had consequently no right to reveal it. On the other hand, it is obvious that the humanity of Christ, being a creature, could not of itself know the hidden counsels of Providence, though our Lord no doubt possessed this knowledge by and through the Hypostatic Union, because He was the “Son of man” and destined to be the Judge of the living and the dead. (Joseph Pohle, Christology: A Dogmatic Treatise on the Incarnation [2d ed.; St. Louis, Miss.: B. Herder, 1913], 270-72)
