Mark 13:32: Can We Choose What God Already Knows?

20 Oct, 2026

Jesus knew who would betray him and who would deny him, yet said he did not know the day or the hour. What that tells us about free will.

Giotto di Bondone, Kiss of Judas, fresco, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, c. 1304 to 1306. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Near the end of Mark's Gospel, on the Mount of Olives, Jesus tells four of his disciples that the temple will fall and that the Son of Man will come in clouds with great power. He then makes two statements about the timing that sit oddly together. In Mark 13:30 he says that "this generation will not pass away until all these things take place." Two verses later he says something no one expects from that speaker.

But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. (Mark 13:32)

The Gospels portray the same Jesus predicting the future in fine detail. He tells Peter he will deny him three times before the rooster crows twice, sends two disciples to find a man carrying a jar of water, and knows, in John's account, from the beginning which of the Twelve will betray him. Matthew even has him state what would have happened in histories that never took place. Yet the date of the end, the one fact everyone most wants, he says he does not have. Whatever one believes about the text, it unsettles a simple assumption, that divine knowledge is a single undivided thing, and the verse works best as a puzzle that motivates the inquiry rather than as evidence that settles it.

The problem is sharpest in the case of Judas. If Jesus knew what Judas would do, why choose him, and in what sense was the betrayal Judas's own? Underneath that question are three propositions the debate keeps running together. Call them knowledge, determination, and alternatives. God knows what will happen. God determines what will happen. A person can choose otherwise. The three are not inconsistent on their face. They conflict only once further premises are added about time, necessity, and what freedom requires, and the schools in this debate are best distinguished by which of those further premises they accept. Two separate questions follow. Can God know a choice infallibly without making it necessary? And if God creates the circumstances in which he knows the choice will be made, how much of the outcome belongs to God? Most confusion in this subject comes from answering one of these questions and believing the other has been answered too.

Genesis asked first

The problem is older than the Gospels. In Eden, God gives a command, and a command presupposes alternatives; there is no point forbidding a tree to someone who cannot eat from it. The humans eat. Yet the New Testament describes the remedy as settled before the choice was made: Christ was "foreknown before the foundation of the world" (1 Peter 1:20). If the remedy was planned before the Fall, the Fall was anticipated in the outcome, and the Latin Easter liturgy draws the conclusion without embarrassment, calling Adam's sin a felix culpa, a happy fault, because of what it produced. The structure is already complete in the first story. A free act is forbidden, the act occurs, the act is blamed, and the outcome it leads to was intended all along. Genesis 3:15 announces that outcome immediately: the woman's offspring will bruise the serpent's head, and the serpent will bruise his heel. At the Last Supper, Jesus applies Psalm 41:9 to Judas, "he who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me." Whether John intended the echo is uncertain, but the image of a heel recurs at both ends of the story.

Genesis also ends on the problem. Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery for 20 pieces of silver, and the brother who proposes the sale is Judah (Genesis 37:26 to 28). Judas is the Greek form of Judah. Years later Joseph tells his brothers what the sale meant.

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Genesis 50:20)

Logically, the verse asserts something precise. One act carries two intentions held by two agents, and the evil of one does not cancel the good of the other. There is no contradiction in that. Two people can intend different ends through the same event, as a prosecutor and a defense attorney both intend something by the same trial. The harder question is whether the outcome being fixed fixes the act, and here a distinction from mathematics helps. Knowing the endpoint of a path does not tell you the path. William James made the point in "The Dilemma of Determinism" (1884) with a chess master playing a novice. The master cannot predict the novice's next move, but he knows he will win, because he can answer anything. Gregory Boyd later borrowed the image to argue that God can guarantee the ending without scripting the players. The analogy separates two propositions: the outcome is fixed, and every action leading to the outcome is fixed. The first does not entail the second. Applied to Judas, the crucifixion could belong to a divine plan without requiring Judas in particular to betray. The analogy also has limits. The master's confidence is practical, not infallible knowledge of each move, so it distinguishes controlling outcomes from controlling actions without settling anything about foreknowledge. And it has a cost. On that model no player's choice can change who wins. It can change only that player's own part in the game.

Judas and the determined betrayal

The Gospels make the Judas case as hard as it can be made. John says Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him, and in John 6:70 he calls one of the Twelve a devil; the narrator identifies Judas. Jesus keeps him close anyway, and at the Last Supper tells him to do quickly what he is going to do (John 13:27). Luke then states the problem in a single sentence.

For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed! (Luke 22:22)

Matthew adds that it would have been better for that man never to have been born. Read as a logical claim, the verse asserts determination of the outcome and culpability of the agent together. Acts goes further. Peter's sermon says Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23), and the church's prayer in Acts 4:28 says Herod and Pilate did "whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place." The vocabulary even overlaps. Paradidōmi, to hand over, is the verb for what Judas does and also the verb Paul uses when God "gave him up" (Romans 8:32) and when Jesus "gave himself" (Galatians 2:20). A shared verb is not a shared intention, which is Genesis 50:20 again in Greek.

Precision matters here, because the texts support less than they first appear to. They assert that God planned the crucifixion. They do not, on their face, assert that God determined each choice Judas made along the way, and moving from the first claim to the second is the question, not the answer. Some of the case was also assembled after the fact. Matthew attributes the 30 pieces of silver to Jeremiah, though the wording draws principally on Zechariah 11, and many historians think the detailed predictions in the Gospels were shaped by writers who knew how the story ended. "Scripture was fulfilled" describes how the evangelists understood the events at least as much as it describes a constraint that operated on Judas at the time.

Peter and the symmetry problem

Peter supplies the control case. At the same supper, Jesus tells him he will deny him, and he does. Both men are in the inner circle, both are warned, and both do what they were told they would do. Luke then adds a second prediction.

Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. (Luke 22:31 and 32)

The prediction covers the return as well as the failure, and that produces a symmetry problem. Any argument that foreknowledge removes freedom applies equally to every foreknown act. If it removes the freedom of Judas's betrayal, it removes the freedom of Peter's repentance, and Peter's return becomes no more his own than Judas's kiss. Few people who use the argument against Judas want that conclusion, which suggests that the argument proves either too much or nothing. Matthew records that Judas also felt remorse and returned the silver, so the difference between the two men is not regret. The recorded difference is that Jesus prayed for one of them. The text does not say Judas could not have turned back, but it shows that the intervention was not distributed evenly, and any account of freedom has to explain the response to a predicted act as well as the act itself.

Molina and middle knowledge

Boethius gave the first serious answer around the year 524: God does not foresee from an earlier point in time but sees all moments from an eternal present, so knowing an act is like watching it, and watching does not cause. The answer separates knowing from causing. It does not explain how an act eternally known could have gone another way.

Luis de Molina went further. A Spanish Jesuit born in 1535, he published his Concordia in Lisbon in 1588 and divided God's knowledge into three logical moments. Natural knowledge covers everything that could happen. Free knowledge covers everything that will happen, given the world God creates. Between them sits middle knowledge, God's knowledge of what every free creature would freely do in every possible circumstance. The middle category is the whole innovation, and its objects have a precise logical form, the counterfactual of freedom: if agent A were in circumstances C, A would freely do X. Molinists have long found an example in the Gospels.

For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. (Matthew 11:21)

Applied to Judas, the account says God knew the counterfactual "if Judas were in the circumstances of that Passover, he would freely betray," and chose to create a world containing those circumstances. In Vegas terms, the house does not just set the odds. It picks the table, picks the player, and knows the hand before it is dealt. Structurally, that is a description of framing: arrange the conditions, knowing what the man will do in them, then hold him responsible. Molina's reply turns on who controls the counterfactual. God does not decide what Judas would do in those circumstances; the truth is up to Judas, and God can only choose among the worlds such truths make feasible. Responsibility for the choice stays with Judas, and responsibility for the world stays with God. Molina's Dominican opponents, led by Domingo Báñez, rejected the reply and held that God's causal action must reach every act. The De Auxiliis controversy ran for years in Rome until Pope Paul V closed it in 1607 by letting both sides keep teaching and forbidding either to condemn the other. The Catholic Church has never formally decided between them.

Molina in America

Molina might have remained a footnote to Counter-Reformation history if American analytic philosophers had not revived him in the 1970s. Alvin Plantinga's free will defense, in God, Freedom, and Evil and The Nature of Necessity, both 1974, rests on counterfactuals of freedom. If such truths exist and are not up to God, then even an omnipotent God cannot actualize any world he likes, because he cannot make a free person freely do right. Plantinga called the contrary assumption Leibniz's Lapse, and he introduced a property that reads as though it were defined for Judas: transworld depravity, the possibility that a person would go wrong at least once in every world God could actualize that contains him and leaves him free.

Robert Merrihew Adams observed in 1977 that Plantinga had rebuilt Molina's middle knowledge, and he argued against both. His paper, "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil," in American Philosophical Quarterly, questioned whether counterfactuals of freedom could be true at all, and it became one of the most cited statements of what is now called the grounding objection, a worry with roots in the original Dominican critique of Molina. The objection asks a simple question. What makes the counterfactual about Judas true? Not anything Judas actually did, because it has to be true before God decides whether Judas will exist. Not God's decision, because then the choice would not be free. If nothing grounds it, perhaps there is no fact there to know. The objection bears directly on the framing charge. If there is no fact about what Judas would do, God did not arrange the circumstances knowing the result, and the betrayal becomes Judas's in a stronger sense, at the price of God's certainty.

The defenders answered in kind. Alfred Freddoso of Notre Dame translated Part IV of the Concordia in 1988 and made Molina's own arguments available in English. William Lane Craig defended middle knowledge in The Only Wise God (1987), arguing that the grounding objection, if it worked, would equally eliminate ordinary truths about the future. Thomas Flint's Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (1998) gave the view its most systematic statement. Molinism is among the most developed attempts to reconcile providence with libertarian freedom, and its adequacy remains contested. It also makes the second question unavoidable. A designer who chooses the exact board, the exact opponent, and the exact player, knowing the exact result, has done something an ordinary designer has not.

The argument from the fixed past

The sharpest objection targets foreknowledge itself. Nelson Pike gave it its modern form in "Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action" in The Philosophical Review in 1965, and William Hasker developed it most thoroughly in God, Time, and Knowledge (1989). Stated with Judas as the example, the argument runs in six steps.

1. Before the Passover, God believed that Judas would betray Jesus.
2. The past is now fixed: no one can now act so that God did not hold that belief.
3. Necessarily, if God believes something, it is true.
4. So no one, Judas included, can act so that Judas does not betray.
5. If Judas cannot do otherwise, he does not act freely.
6. So Judas does not betray freely.

The argument does not claim that knowledge causes anything. It claims that an infallible belief, once in the past, removes the alternative. Every major position in this debate can be identified by the premise it rejects. Boethius rejects the first, because God has no "before"; his knowledge is eternal, not past. Open Theists also reject the first, for a different reason: before Judas chooses, there is no fact yet for God to believe. Followers of William of Ockham reject the second, arguing that God's past belief is a "soft" fact that depends on what Judas will do, so Judas has a kind of power over it. Compatibilists, including most Reformed theologians, reject the fifth, holding that freedom means acting from your own will, not having been able to do otherwise. Linda Zagzebski's The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (1991) maps these escape routes and their costs.

One famous logical error is also worth naming, because it is the most common move in popular arguments about predestination. Premise 3 says the conditional is necessary: necessarily, if God believes Judas will betray, Judas betrays. It does not follow that the betrayal itself is necessary, and sliding from the first to the second is a modal fallacy. Hasker grants the point. His argument does not rely on the slide; it relies on premise 2, and that is why it is hard to answer. He also turns it against Molina, arguing that if the counterfactual about Judas was settled before Judas existed, Judas had no power over it either. His own position is Open Theism, shared with Boyd and John Sanders. The view carries a cost most traditional theists will not pay, the surrender of exhaustive foreknowledge, yet the game metaphor, read naturally, points toward it.

Jesus and the freedom to obey

Read with the argument in view, the Gospels contain a figure who tests premise 5 from the other side. As the evangelists portray him, Jesus knows his own future and acts on that knowledge, and the texts treat his action as free. Much of what he does is deliberate fulfillment of Scripture. He sends for a donkey because Zechariah 9:9 promised a king riding on one, and John says that at the cross, "knowing that all was now finished," he said "I thirst" to fulfill the Scripture (John 19:28). Fulfilling a text on purpose resembles keeping a promise. It can be predicted, and it is still the agent's own act, because it proceeds from his intention. Predictability alone is not the problem. The argument above depends on infallibility, which a promise does not have, so the analogy weakens the intuition behind fatalism without refuting it.

The Gospels' fulfillments fall into three logical kinds. Some Jesus could perform himself, like the donkey. Some depended on other people who did not know they were fulfilling anything: soldiers casting lots for his clothing, leaving his legs unbroken, piercing his side, a rich man burying him. Some no one chose, like a birth in Bethlehem, and these are the cases where historians most suspect the narrative was shaped to fit the text; Matthew even has Jesus ride two animals at once, apparently reading the parallel lines of Zechariah as two beasts. Judas belongs to the second kind. He is the Scripture Jesus could not fulfill himself. The difference between the two men is not that one fulfilled prophecy and the other did not, but that one knew and chose his part and the other, as far as the text reports, did neither.

Gethsemane sharpens the test. Jesus asks that the cup be removed, which presupposes an alternative, then accepts it: "not what I will, but what you will" (Mark 14:36). At the arrest he says he could call on more than 12 legions of angels and then asks how the Scriptures would be fulfilled if he did (Matthew 26:53 and 54). In John 10:18 he says no one takes his life from him; he lays it down of his own accord. If infallible knowledge of your own future destroyed freedom, this would be its clearest casualty, and the texts treat it instead as the freest act in the story. The obvious objection is fair: Jesus is not an ordinary agent, and a divine nature may relate knowledge and choice in ways no human shares. The case does not prove compatibility. It shows that the Gospels do not treat foreknowledge and freedom as contradictory, and it locates the difference between Jesus and Judas in what each willed, not in whether the outcome was known.

Mark 13 adds the last complication. The chapter that contains the title verse also contains a deadline, "this generation will not pass away," and Christians have argued ever since about what it meant. The day itself, according to Acts 1:7, has been "fixed by the Father's own authority," yet the Son does not know it. The verse distinguishes the Son's professed knowledge from the Father's, and it cannot prove that an event can be fixed without being known, since the Father knows it. Any distinction among certainty, fixity, and knowledge has to be established by argument, as the sections above attempt. What the verse contributes is narrower and still useful: the Gospels themselves do not treat divine knowledge as one undivided block.

Can the players choose?

So was Judas framed? The charge has three versions, and they come apart. The first is that the evidence was arranged. In the literary sense, partly yes, since the evangelists read Judas through the Psalms and the prophets, but that charge concerns the Gospels, not Judas's freedom. The second is that the circumstances were arranged by someone who knew the result. Acts concedes the planning, and Molina, Plantinga, Craig, and Flint all accept the knowledge. The tradition can hold that God willed the handing over and condemned the man who did it only by dividing God's will, between what God decrees and what God commands in Reformed theology, or between what God wills antecedently and consequently in Aquinas. Genesis 50:20 shows that two intentions in one act involve no contradiction. It does not show why the agent of the evil intention was this man at this table, and that second question, how much of the outcome belongs to God, remains open.

The third version is that Judas had no alternative at all. That holds only if all six steps of the argument from the fixed past hold, and every school described here survives by denying one of them. None of the denials is free. Boethius must explain what eternal knowledge is, the Ockhamist must explain how anyone has power over the past, the Open Theist must give up knowledge of the future, and the compatibilist must accept that Judas could not have done otherwise and was condemned anyway. The chess master shows that controlling an outcome is conceptually distinct from controlling the actions that produce it. Peter shows that the problem of foreknowledge applies equally to praised acts and condemned ones. Neither example shows that exhaustive foreknowledge leaves room for real alternatives, and what none of it settles is whether another move was available to Judas when the move he would make was already, infallibly, known. Only the Father knows the day. After 2,000 years the question is still the one in the title: can we choose what God already knows?

Further Reading

Sources

• Scripture quotations follow the English Standard Version.
• Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia, translated by Alfred J. Freddoso, Cornell University Press, 1988.
• Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, Harper and Row, 1974; and The Nature of Necessity, Oxford University Press, 1974.
• Robert Merrihew Adams, "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil," American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977).
• Nelson Pike, "Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action," The Philosophical Review 74 (1965).
• William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge, Cornell University Press, 1989.
• William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God, Baker, 1987.
• Linda Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, Cornell University Press, 1998.
• William James, "The Dilemma of Determinism," 1884, collected in The Will to Believe, 1897.
• Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible, Baker, 2000.
• James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, editors, Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, IVP Academic, 2001.
• Foreknowledge and Free Will, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised February 2026. The formal reconstruction of theological fatalism and the map of which premises each school rejects.
• David Torrijos, De Auxiliis Controversy, Conimbricenses.org Encyclopedia, 2022.
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V.
• William Klassen, Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus?, Fortress Press, 1996.
• Maarten J. J. Menken, The Old Testament Quotation in Matthew 27,9-10: Textual Form and Context, Biblica 83 (2002).

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