Could Jesus have sinned?

Jesus would certainly be capable of sinning but there would be no impetus or desire to do so. This can be further explained by looking at a couple of concepts about the Triune nature of the Godhead, consisting of the Father, Son and Spirit. First, as God is perfect, there cannot be any association with sin or any imperfection. God’s holiness would repel any sin or blemish and cannot be in proximity to any imperfection, as noted in Ps 5:4, ‘For You are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil cannot dwell with You’. As the three persons are traditionally viewed as equals in the Trinity, all would share the same characteristics and aspects as well and this can be seen in John 10:30, where Jesus says, ‘I and the Father are one’ thus inferring the equivalency of the two persons. Thus, Jesus as the Son would not be able to tolerate sin with his holy nature just as God would not be able to through his nature.

Secondly, any aspect of sin associated with his nature would result in an imperfect Son and in turn an imperfect God. This of course, runs contrary to the necessary characteristic of holiness in the ultimate Divine Being and the necessity of being perfect. Throughout history, the definition of God points to a flawless, infallible, divine and holy being. With God’s nature being pure and holy, any deficiency would vacate his perfection and He would not be of sufficient nature to have the position as a holy, unfailing deity. All of the attributes that mankind has discovered and/or assigned to God would require a perfect being: all-knowable, all-powerful, all-seeing, etc. Any blemish of His perfection would render him fallible and not omnipotent, holy, and divine.

Thirdly, this not to say that Jesus was not capable of sin, it is merely that his desire to sin was not there. This capability for sin may be traced back to his acceptance of his humanity for his mission, where this was achieved due to the kenosis that he underwent as referred to in Phil 2:7a, ‘Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a slave,’ and to a lesser extent in Heb 5:8, ‘Though he was God’s Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.’ However, under the equivalency theory, despite the three persons being viewed as equivalent, there are times when one person accepts functional subordination for the sake of a particular task and this is only a temporary submission, but this is not a permanent condition.

To validate his humanity, he was born of a woman, grew up and also suffered from many of the same emotional and physical aspects of being a human. He suffered from hunger (Matt 4:2 – post temptation in the wilderness), need for sleep (Mark 4:38 – sleeping at the stern of the boat), pain (Matt 26:67 – beating at the hands of the guards), anger (Mark 5:16 – driving out the vendors at the Temple), sorrow (John 11:35 – weeping over death of Lazarus) and more. In the case of Jesus being becoming human for the purpose of his accomplishing his mission as the sacrifice for mankind, this humanism opened him up to the possibility of sin and temptation. This is also most prominently seen after his baptism, where he went off into the wilderness and was subsequently tempted by Satan in Matt 4, Mark 1, and Luke 4. This definitively points to Jesus as human and by extension, vulnerable to the same inadequacies as other humans, a/k/a sin. However, he is also still divine, and this divinity rendered him sinless as shown in 1 Pet 2:22 – ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’