"The Son Was Only Given Authority" — "All That the Father Has Is Mine" and the Texts About the Father Being Greater

Jesus does not say “some things,” or “the things assigned to me for my mission.” He says “everything” (Greek panta hosa, “all things whatsoever”). Whatever belongs to the Father as God — omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, the right to be worshipped, the prerogative of final judgment — the Son claims as his own by right. And it is mutual:

John 17:10 — “All I have is Yours, and all You have is Mine.”
John 5:26 — “For as the Father has life in Himself, so also He has granted the Son to have life in Himself” — not borrowed life, but life in himself, the defining property of God alone (Deuteronomy 32:39; Psalm 36:9).
Matthew 11:27 — “All things have been entrusted to Me by My Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son” — a mutual, exhaustive knowledge that no creature could have of God.
Colossians 2:9 — “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.”

A creature can be handed a delegated task. A creature cannot possess everything the Father has and be known by the Father as exhaustively as the Father is known by him. That is a statement of shared nature.

(a) Eternal relations of origin. Historic Christian teaching says the Son is eternally from the Father — “begotten, not made” (Nicaea, 325). The Father is the source; the Son and Spirit are not later or lesser, but receive the one divine essence eternally and completely. This is what the Fathers called the monarchy of the Father: an order (Greek taxis) within God, not a ladder of beings. On this frame, “the Son has life granted to him” (John 5:26) describes an eternal giving in which nothing is missing — as light is “from” the sun without ever being separate from it or later than it.

(b) The incarnate mission. Other “given” texts describe the Son as the incarnate Messiah being invested with a public, mediatorial office: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matthew 28:18), spoken after the resurrection; “the Father… has given all judgment to the Son… because He is the Son of Man” (John 5:22, 27). This is exactly the enthronement of the divine-human figure of Daniel 7:13–14, to whom “was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples… should serve him” — an everlasting dominion, and the verb for “serve” there (Aramaic pelach) is elsewhere used only for the worship of God.

Neither frame implies the Son lacked deity. Frame (a) is an eternal relation with no deficiency; frame (b) is the public conferral of a kingdom on the one who stepped into our nature to win it (Philippians 2:6–11).

(a) The two natures. The eternal Son took a complete human nature, including a real human mind that “increased in wisdom” (Luke 2:52). Statements can be true of the one person according to his humanity that are not true of him according to his deity. As God the Son, he searches hearts (Mark 2:8; John 2:24–25) and is called by Peter the one who “knows all things” (John 21:17); as the incarnate Son living a genuinely human life, he did not carry the timing of the end in his human consciousness. This is the same person, two ranges of experience.

(b) The point of the saying is not Christology — it is watchfulness. The whole discourse is a call to be ready because the time is hidden (Mark 13:33–37). Jesus lists those who do not disclose it — angels, the Son — precisely to shut down date-setting. He is not filing a report on the metaphysics of his knowledge.

(c) “Know” can mean “make known.” In Scripture “to know” often means to acknowledge or to reveal (e.g. 1 Corinthians 2:2; Genesis 22:12). Read that way, the sense is: it is not the Son’s to announce the day — that disclosure belongs to the Father. Several Church Fathers took the text this way.

(d) It fits the mediator’s posture. Acts 1:7 repeats the idea after the resurrection: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority” — the timing is reserved to the Father’s authority as the one who sends. The Son, in the days of his ministry, speaks and acts as the sent one.

Athanasius, Against the Arians 3.42–50 (c. 340): argues that the Word, as God, knows all things, since he is the Father’s own Wisdom; the ignorance is proper to the human nature he assumed for our sake. What he took on he made his own, so that he could be said to be ignorant “humanly” while as the Word he knows the day.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.15 (c. 380): everyone must see that the Son knows as God and does not know as man — if one separates the two natures in thought. The ignorance is to be assigned to the manhood, not to the Godhead; alternatively, the Son knows the day as knowing the Father, and the statement stresses that the Father is the origin of that knowledge.

Basil of Caesarea, Letter 236 (to Amphilochius): offers the reading that “no one knows… but the Father” means the Son’s knowledge has its cause in the Father, just as his being does; and the “economic” reading, that the Son withholds rather than lacks the day.

Augustine, On the Trinity 1.12 (c. 410): takes it as a form of speech — the Son “did not know” in the sense that it was not his to make the disciples know; Scripture often says God “does not know” what he does not approve or disclose.

Cyril of Alexandria applies the same principle used across the Gospels: what belongs to the humanity is truly said of the one Christ, without dividing him or denying his deity.

None of these writers concluded the Son was a creature. Every one of them held the full deity of the Son and read this verse within it.

(a) The word is “greater,” not “better.” Jesus says the Father is meizōn (greater in position, relation, rank), not kreissōn / kreittōn (superior in nature or quality). When the New Testament wants to say something is superior by nature, it uses that second word — e.g. Christ is “superior” (kreittōn) to the angels, having a “more excellent” name (Hebrews 1:4). John 14:28 deliberately does not use that word. In the same Gospel Jesus says “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) and “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). “Greater” here is about relationship, not about a lower kind of being.

(b) The context is the departure. The reason the disciples should “rejoice” is that Jesus is going to the Father — leaving the state of humiliation, suffering and mortal weakness, and returning to the glory he had “before the world existed” (John 17:5). In the condition of the incarnate servant, being welcomed home by the Father is a movement upward; that is the sense in which, right now, the Father is “greater” than the Son-in-the-flesh. This is Philippians 2:6–9 in one sentence: he “emptied Himself… therefore God exalted Him.”

(c) Order of origin. Even setting the incarnation aside, the Father is the source within the Godhead — the Son is eternally from the Father. A source can be called “greater” without the one who comes from it being of a lesser nature, exactly as a spring is not a “greater” kind of thing than the river, yet the river is “from” it.

(d) A lesser being would be no comfort. Jesus offers this line to console frightened disciples. “Rejoice, because I am going to someone bigger than me” is not consolation. “Rejoice, because I am going home to the Father, and from there the Father and I will send you the Spirit and come to you” (John 14:16–23) — that is.

Athanasius, Against the Arians 1.58 (c. 340): the Father is called greater not because the Son is of a different or inferior essence, but because the Father is the beginning from whom the Son is begotten; the Son is proper to the Father’s essence and not external to it.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.7 (c. 380): gives two answers. First, the Father is “greater” as cause — and the cause of an equal is not thereby of a higher nature, for what he causes is his equal. Second, the words belong to the Son as man; measured against pure Godhead, the humanity is “less.”

Chrysostom, Homilies on John 75: reads “greater” as spoken in the disciples’ own terms and with reference to the Father as origin; he insists it cannot mean a difference of substance, or John 10:30 and 14:9 would be contradicted.

Augustine, On the Trinity 1.7: the classic formula — “in the form of God” the Son is equal to the Father; “in the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7) the Father is greater. Both are true of the same Christ at once, because he is one person in two natures.

Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity 9: argues from “all that the Father has is Mine” that the Son can lack nothing of the divine nature; “greater” must therefore be read of the Father as the one who gives, not of a Son who is short of Godhead.

John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 1.8: we call the Father greater than the Son in respect of causation only — not in nature, nor in time, for the Son is co-eternal and consubstantial.

This was the settled reading long before Islam: the Council of Nicaea (325) and the Definition of Chalcedon (451) both stand on it — one being, and one person in two complete natures.

On John 14:28: the commentary tradition consistently notes the meizōn / kreissōn distinction and reads “greater” either of the incarnate humiliation or of the Father as fount of deity, never of a lower essence — see Murray J. Harris, Jesus as God: The New Testament Use of Theos in Reference to Jesus (1992), on this verse; and the treatment of Johannine Christology in Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (2008), which shows that this same Gospel places Jesus within the unique identity of the one God (John 1:1–3; 8:58; 20:28).

On Mark 13:32: the standard critical commentaries (e.g. R.T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC, 2002; Craig Evans, Mark 8:27–16:20, WBC, 2001) take the verse as a real statement about the limits of Jesus’ human knowledge in his earthly ministry, set inside a call to vigilance — and note that the early scribal history shows the Church wrestling with it (some manuscripts of Matthew 24:36 omit “nor the Son,” a later softening, not the original).

On the “given” texts: Simon Gathercole, The Preexistent Son (2006), and Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology (2012), document that the earliest Christians already spoke of the Son as pre-existent and as sharing YHWH’s identity, while also describing his messianic investiture — the two frames run side by side from the first generation, not as a later contradiction.

“He was only given authority.” — And he says “everything the Father has is Mine” (John 16:15) and “all You have is Mine” (John 17:10). You cannot be handed what you already own; the giving shows the relationship, not a deficiency.

“The Son doesn’t know the hour, so he isn’t God.” — The same Gospels say he knows people’s thoughts and “knows all things” (John 16:30; 21:17). He took a real human mind (Luke 2:52); the saying is a call to watchfulness, and the disclosure of the day belongs to the Father (Acts 1:7).

“The Father is greater than the Son.” — “Greater” (meizōn), not “better by nature” (kreissōn). Said by the Son in humiliation, on his way back to glory (John 17:5), of the Father as source — in the same chapter as “whoever has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).