St. Bonaventure distinguishes 5 types of knowledge in Christ:
1. Divine knowledge which He would have as the 2nd Divine Person of the Trinity.
2. Beatific knowledge which His human nature had from the beatific vision which His human soul had of the Divinity from the very moment of the Incarnation, the moment of its creation.
3. Infused knowledge of all things pertaining to salvation history which the Divinity would have infused into His human soul.
4. Knowledge of the essence of all created things.
5. Experimental knowledge—whereby Jesus learned by experience what He already knew by some or all of the various other avenues of knowledge listed above. Only in this way could Our Lord grow in wisdom and knowledge, namely, He learned from experience what He already knew in different ways. (By way of analogy, this happens to us when we have a textbook knowledge of something, for example, of driving—so we know it from the book—but we learn it in a new way (by experience) when we get behind the wheel and actually experience it.)
If we don’t say that Our Lord knew who He was or what His mission was, we end up (as you noted) falling into one heresy or another. He knew, but He “learned obedience by what He suffered” (somewhere in Hebrews), He learned from experience what it was to be the Messiah—not because He didn’t know before, but He didn’t know from experience.
Pax et bonum...
This is a fantastic thread. I’ve been stumbling around attempting to explain all this to my “almost there” non-Catholic husband.
The whole thread is a great help, very clear and concise.
I forgot to thank you for this.