Could Jesus Have Sinned? Temptation and the Sinless Christ

The New Testament says Jesus was tempted in every way we are, yet without sin. Christians have asked ever since whether he could have given in.

In brief

The Orthodox answer: Jesus Christ could not sin. The one who wills and acts in both his divine and his human nature is the eternal Son of God. That does not make his human freedom, temptation, suffering or obedience any less real.

Christians agree that Jesus never sinned. The harder question is whether he could have. If he could not, critics ask, were his temptations real, and can he really sympathise with people who fall? If he could, was the Son of God capable of turning against the Father? The Fathers answer both questions. This article sets out what the New Testament says, what the councils defined, and why St. John of Damascus and St. Maximus the Confessor conclude that sin was impossible for Christ, while his temptations were entirely real; Thomas Aquinas gives the same answer in the West. It also sets out, from their own writings, the contrary Protestant view of Charles Hodge, who held that Christ could have sinned, and the reply of his fellow Reformed theologian W. G. T. Shedd, who held that he could not. The background is in What Is the Hypostatic Union?, especially the teaching that Christ has a human will as well as a divine one, and in The Identity of Jesus.

On this page

• What the New Testament says
• What the councils defined
• Why he could not sin
• The Protestant view that he could have sinned
• Answering the objection
• Why the question matters
• What we can say confidently
• Other views and open questions
• Notes

What the New Testament says

Two sets of statements create the question. The first says that Jesus was without sin. Hebrews describes him as “one who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin.”¹ Paul calls him the one “who knew no sin”,² First Peter the one “who did not sin”,³ and First John says “in him is no sin.”⁴ In John's Gospel Jesus challenges his opponents: “Which of you convicts me of sin?”⁵

The second set says the temptations were real and costly. After forty days of fasting in the wilderness Jesus “was hungry afterward”, and the tempter's first suggestion addresses exactly that hunger: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”⁶ Luke adds that the devil “departed from him until another time”,⁷ implying the testing continued. In Gethsemane Jesus “began to be greatly troubled and distressed” and prayed, “Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire.”⁸ Hebrews draws the conclusion for believers: “For in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.”⁹ It even says that, “though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which he suffered.”¹⁰

One more text complicates the picture. James writes that “God can’t be tempted by evil”, and that “each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”¹¹ If Jesus is God, how could he be tempted? And if temptation normally works through a person's own wrong desires, how was Jesus tempted without them?

What the councils defined

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 (see What Did the Council of Chalcedon Actually Define?) confessed that Christ is fully human, “made in all things like us, sin only excepted”.¹² Leo the Great's letter, which the council endorsed, says the same from the other direction: “For what the Deceiver brought in and man deceived committed, had no trace in the Saviour. Nor, because He partook of man's weaknesses, did He therefore share our faults.”¹³

The Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681 addressed the will directly. Christ has a genuine human will, and that will is in harmony with the divine: “these two natural wills are not contrary the one to the other (God forbid!) as the impious heretics assert, but his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will.”¹⁴ The council was defending the reality of Christ's human will, which is why its teaching bears on this question.

These texts settle that Christ was sinless and that his human will never opposed God. The Fathers draw the conclusion that follows from them: the one who wills in Christ is the eternal Son, and a human will that follows the divine will, “not as resisting and reluctant”, cannot turn against it. Christ did not merely happen not to sin; sin was impossible for him. This is the teaching of the Orthodox Church. Some later Protestant theologians disagreed; their view is set out below for comparison, not as an alternative Orthodox teaching.

Why he could not sin

The Orthodox Church teaches, with the Fathers, that Christ was not only sinless but impeccable: unable to sin. Catholic theology and most of the historic tradition agree. The central argument concerns who Christ is. Sin is an act of a person, and the person in Christ is the eternal Son of God. For the Son to sin would be for God to act against himself. The human nature is truly human, but it belongs to a divine person and is never left to act on its own.

John of Damascus, in the eighth century, adds a point about how Christ's human will worked. Human beings, he explains, usually reach decisions through a process of weighing options they do not fully understand. He calls this judgment (the Greek is gnōmē) and says it cannot properly be ascribed to Christ:

“And we cannot, if we wish to be accurate, speak of Christ as having judgment (γνώμη) and preference. … But the Lord being not mere man but also God, and knowing all things, had no need of inquiry, and investigation, and counsel, and decision, and by nature made whatever is good His own and whatever is bad foreign to Him.”

John is not denying that Christ willed humanly. He is denying that Christ's human willing involved the uncertain deliberation that makes a fall possible for us.

Later in the same book he explains how the two wills relate. Christ's human will was truly free and truly his own, but it always willed what the divine will willed: “the soul of the Lord being moved of its own free-will willed, but willed of its free-will those things which His divine will willed it to will.” The two wills differed, he says, “not in inclination but rather in natural power.”¹⁵ There was never a second inclination in Christ that might have pulled against God.

Here John follows St. Maximus the Confessor, whose teaching on the two wills the Sixth Council upheld. In the Disputation with Pyrrhus, the record of his debate at Carthage in 645 with the former patriarch of Constantinople, Maximus calls the deliberating way we will the gnomic will: since the Fall we hesitate between apparent goods, weigh them and can choose wrongly. Christ's human will is fully human, but it is the will of the Son, and so it has no such wavering. “It is thus not possible to say that Christ had a gnomic will,” Maximus concludes, for he “naturally hath an inclination to the good and drawing away from evil.” To give Christ a gnomic will, he warns, would make the Lord “a mutable and sinful man.”¹⁵

Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, explains why Christ took on human weaknesses such as hunger and suffering but not sin. Christ, he says, “assumed our defects that He might satisfy for us, that He might prove the truth of His human nature, and that He might become an example of virtue to us. Now it is plain that by reason of these three things He ought not to have assumed the defect of sin.”¹⁶ Sin would have made him unable to atone for others, would not have proved he was human (since sin is not part of human nature as God made it), and would have destroyed his example.

How, then, were the temptations real? John of Damascus answers that Christ “assumed the whole man and all man's attributes save sin”, including hunger, weariness, fear and the agony in the garden. The wicked one “made his assault from without, not by thoughts prompted inwardly”, and “the Lord repulsed the assault and dispelled it like vapour.”¹⁵ Aquinas, in the West, draws the same distinction about the source of a temptation. “Now temptation which comes from an enemy can be without sin: because it comes about by merely outward suggestion. But temptation which comes from the flesh cannot be without sin, because such a temptation is caused by pleasure and concupiscence”. So “Christ wished to be tempted by an enemy, but not by the flesh.”¹⁷ On this reading James and Hebrews do not conflict. Jesus was genuinely tempted from outside, in hunger, fear and suffering, but not through disordered desires within, which is the kind of temptation James describes.

William G. T. Shedd, professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, defended the same conclusion in 1888, using Latin terms from the older tradition. Adam was able not to sin; Christ was unable to sin:

“He was characterized not only by the posse non peccare, but the non posse peccare. He was not only able to overcome temptation, but he was unable to be overcome by it.”

Shedd's summary distinguishes the nature from the person: “Christ while having a peccable human nature in his constitution, was an impeccable person.”¹⁹

The Protestant view that he could have sinned

Shedd was disagreeing with one of the most respected theologians of his day. Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary took the opposite view in his Systematic Theology. He affirmed Christ's sinlessness as strongly as anyone, and then denied that it amounted to impeccability:

“This sinlessness of our Lord, however, does not amount to absolute impeccability. It was not a non potest peccare. If He was a true man He must have been capable of sinning. … Temptation implies the possibility of sin. If from the constitution of his person it was impossible for Christ to sin, then his temptation was unreal and without effect, and He cannot sympathize with his people.”

Hodge's argument has two parts. The first is about human nature: to be truly human is to be capable of choosing wrongly, so a Christ who could not sin would not be fully like us. The second is about Hebrews: the letter's point is that Jesus can help the tempted because he knows temptation from the inside, and a temptation with no possibility of success seems, to Hodge, to be no temptation at all.

Defenders of this view usually stress that it does not make sin likely, or suggest that Jesus came close to sinning. They hold that his sinlessness was real obedience, sustained moment by moment through his dependence on the Father and the Spirit, and that this is what makes it an example for believers. First Peter presents it in just those terms: Christ suffered, “leaving you an example, that you should follow his steps”, and “when he was cursed, didn’t curse back.”²¹

Answering the objection

Hodge's objection deserves a serious answer, and the Fathers give one.

The Orthodox teaching protects the unity of Christ. If Christ could have sinned, then either the Son of God could have sinned, which denies his divinity, or the one who might have sinned was someone other than the Son, which divides Christ into two persons. That is exactly the division the councils rejected.

Hodge's view is meant to protect the reality of the temptations and of Hebrews' promise of sympathy. It asks what temptation means if yielding was never possible.

The answer comes in two parts. The first is the distinction already drawn by John of Damascus and Aquinas: Christ's temptations were real sufferings and real pressures, coming from outside, even if they found nothing in him that desired evil. Jesus himself says, shortly before his arrest, that “the prince of the world comes, and he has nothing in me.”²² The second is an argument often made in its defence: the one who never gives in faces the whole force of a temptation, while the one who gives in early never feels how strong it can become. On that view, the sinless Christ knows temptation more fully than anyone. Being unable to sin did not make his struggle easy.

Hodge's defenders reply that the possibility belongs to the human nature, not to the divine person, and that God's purpose guaranteed the outcome without removing the freedom. Shedd's reply was that it is the person who acts, so a possibility that could never be actualised by that person is not a real possibility of his. That is the Orthodox reply too: natures do not sin, persons do, and the person of Christ is the Son of God.

That leaves the worry that a will unable to sin is not free. The Fathers answer that Christ's human will was free and chose the good by its own natural movement. Aquinas gives the same answer in the West. He compares Christ to the saints in heaven, whose freedom is not lost but perfected: “The will of Christ, though determined to good, is not determined to this or that good. Hence it pertains to Christ, even as to the blessed, to choose with a free-will confirmed in good.”²³ The freedom to sin is a limitation of creaturely freedom, not its essence.

The disagreement with Hodge is narrower than it first appears. Both sides affirm that Christ never sinned, that he was fully human, that his temptations were real, and that he can sympathise with the tempted. They differ over what those affirmations require, and the Orthodox Church holds that they require a Christ who could not sin.

Why the question matters

The question matters for salvation, not only for speculation. Gregory Nazianzen's principle, set out in Why Did God Become Man?, is that what Christ did not assume he did not heal. The human will is where humanity turned from God. If Christ took a human will and kept it obedient through hunger, fear and death, then the healing of the will has happened in him first. Hebrews also draws a pastoral conclusion: because we have a high priest who was tempted, “Let us therefore draw near with boldness to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace for help in time of need.”²⁴ The incarnate Son could not sin, and that is good news: the healing of our will rests on a victory that could not fail, won through real temptation, real suffering and a free and complete human obedience.

What we can say confidently

The New Testament affirms both that Jesus was genuinely tempted and that he was without sin. The Definition of Chalcedon confesses him “made in all things like us, sin only excepted”, and the Third Council of Constantinople teaches that his human will was real and was not contrary to the divine will. Christ could not sin. That is the teaching of the Orthodox Church: John of Damascus and Maximus the Confessor deny him the uncertain, gnomic deliberation through which human beings fall, and Catholic theology agrees, with Aquinas describing his will as confirmed in good. Some Protestant theologians, of whom Charles Hodge is the best known, have held that he was able to sin but did not; the Orthodox Church does not share that view.

Other views and open questions

Whether Christ was able to sin. This is not an open question for the Orthodox Church, which teaches with the Fathers that he could not; Catholic theology agrees. Some Protestant theologians, Hodge among them, have held that he could. Hodge's view is included to explain that debate, not as an Orthodox option.

What made his temptations real. The Fathers locate their reality in the assault from outside and in the hunger, fear and suffering Christ truly bore; Protestant writers who hold Hodge's view think real temptation requires a real possibility of yielding.

How Christ's human will relates to his knowledge. John of Damascus ties Christ's freedom from deliberative uncertainty to his divine knowledge; theologians who emphasise the limits of Christ's human knowledge, as in Mark 13:32, describe his human choosing differently.

Notes

1. Hebrews 4:15. Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible (public domain). ↩
2. 2 Corinthians 5:21. ↩
3. 1 Peter 2:22. ↩
4. 1 John 3:5. ↩
5. John 8:46. ↩
6. Matthew 4:2–3. ↩
7. Luke 4:13. ↩
8. Mark 14:33, 36. ↩
9. Hebrews 2:18. ↩
10. Hebrews 5:8. ↩
11. James 1:13–14. ↩
12. Council of Chalcedon (451), Definition of Faith, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF 2nd ser. 14 (1900), newadvent.org/fathers/3811.htm. ↩
13. Leo the Great, Letter 28 (the Tome), §III, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12 (1895), newadvent.org/fathers/3604028.htm. ↩
14. Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), Definition of Faith, trans. Percival, newadvent.org/fathers/3813.htm. ↩
15. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III.14, 18 and 20, trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan, NPNF 2nd ser. 9 (1899), newadvent.org/fathers/33043.htm. Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus, trans. Joseph P. Farrell (1990), the passages on the gnomic will. ↩
16. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 15, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (2nd rev. ed., 1920), newadvent.org/summa/4015.htm. ↩
17. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 41, a. 1, reply to objection 3, newadvent.org/summa/4041.htm. ↩
18. William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1888), p. 330, ch. V, Christ's Impeccability; read in the archive.org scan. ↩
19. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, p. 333. On p. 332 Shedd quotes Hodge's words, cited below, and disagrees with them. ↩
20. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (first published 1872), p. 457; read in the archive.org scan of a Charles Scribner's Sons printing. ↩
21. 1 Peter 2:21, 23. ↩
22. John 14:30. ↩
23. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 18, a. 4, reply to objection 3, newadvent.org/summa/4018.htm. The objection Aquinas is answering states that Christ's will was determined to good since He could not sin, citing his own earlier discussion. ↩
24. Hebrews 4:16. ↩

Bibliography

Scripture

• World English Bible. Public domain.

Early and medieval writers, councils

• Council of Chalcedon, Definition of Faith (451); Third Council of Constantinople, Definition of Faith (680–681). Translated by Henry Percival. NPNF, 2nd series, vol. 14. 1900.
• John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Translated by E. W. Watson and L. Pullan. NPNF, 2nd series, vol. 9. 1899.
• Leo the Great. Letter 28, to Flavian. Translated by Charles Lett Feltoe. NPNF, 2nd series, vol. 12. 1895.
• Maximus the Confessor. The Disputation with Pyrrhus. Translated by Joseph P. Farrell. 1990.
• Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, Third Part. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 2nd rev. ed. 1920.

Modern theologians

• Hodge, Charles. Systematic Theology. 3 vols. New York: Charles Scribner, 1871–1873. Vol. 2.
• Shedd, William G. T. Dogmatic Theology. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1888.

Editorial fact-check ledger

Claim	Source checked	Confidence
All Scripture, conciliar, patristic and Aquinas quotations	Pages in the notes; verified bank	Very high (verbatim)
Hodge and Shedd quotations	archive.org OCR text of the printed volumes, checked by verify-bank.mjs	Very high (verbatim; OCR line-break hyphenation rejoined)
Shedd quotes Hodge's passage and disagrees with it	Shedd, vol. 2, p. 332, footnote	Very high
John of Damascus: no gnōmē in Christ; his human will willed what the divine will willed; temptation came from without	Exact Exposition III.14, 18, 20, newadvent.org/fathers/33043.htm	Very high (verbatim)
Maximus: Christ had no gnomic will; a gnomic will would make him “a mutable and sinful man”	Disputation with Pyrrhus, trans. Farrell, checked against a published excerpt of that translation	High (verbatim from the excerpt)
Impeccability is the Orthodox teaching and the majority view in historic theology	Shedd, vol. 2, p. 332, says the creeds and theologians have generally affirmed it; Aquinas and John of Damascus as quoted	High (a general characterisation)
Hodge taught at Princeton Theological Seminary; Shedd at Union Theological Seminary, New York	Standard biographical information; Shedd's title page (1888)	High
Aquinas: Christ's will is determined to good and chooses with a free will confirmed in good	Summa Theologiae III, q. 18, a. 4, objection 3 and reply	Very high
The argument that the one who never yields feels a temptation's full force	Presented as an argument made by defenders of impeccability, not attributed to a named author	Interpretation