Sometimes the most important word in a verse is the one that isn’t there. When Jesus said the Father is greater than he is, he had a choice of words for “greater,” and the word he didn’t pick turns out to carry much of the argument. That unchosen word is κρείττων (kreittōn), sometimes spelled kreissōn — usually translated “better,” or “superior.” The letter to the Hebrews leans on it constantly: a better covenant, better promises, a better hope, something superior in kind.

Here’s the distinction some interpreters built on the gap between the two words. Meizōn, the word Jesus used, is the plain comparative of “great” — greater in size, rank, position, standing. Kreittōn, the word he didn’t use, leans toward quality, worth, nature — better in kind, a superior sort of thing. On that reading, the choice is loaded. A president is greater than the rest of us — higher office, more authority — but he isn’t better, isn’t a superior kind of being; he’s a human like everyone else. So when Jesus reached for meizōn and passed over kreittōn, the argument runs, he was saying the Father is greater in position or order, with nothing said about nature at all.

This is the move Athanasius made in the fourth century, and it’s genuinely ingenious. The Son, he pointed out, did not say the Father is better than I. Had he used kreittōn, the word for superior in kind, the Arians would have had their point: it would suggest the Son is a lesser sort of being, foreign to the Father’s nature. But he used meizōn. And “greater,” Athanasius argued, is precisely what you say of two things on the same scale, two things of the same kind — you’d only say “better” if they were different kinds. So the very word choice, he claimed, shows the Son is not foreign to the Father’s nature but proper to it. The verse the Arians thought was their best weapon became, in his hands, evidence for the opposite.

But the book is honest about the catch, and the catch is real. The clean line between meizōn (“position”) and kreittōn (“nature”) doesn’t hold up in the dictionary. The standard lexicons note that meizōn gets used in plenty of places precisely of those who surpass others in nature and power — including of God himself. And kreittōn, the supposedly “nature” word, gets rendered “greater” in some English Bibles, as if the two were near-synonyms. So you can’t squeeze a whole doctrine out of the word choice.

That’s the value of holding kreittōn up beside meizōn: it shows you the contrast the argument depends on, and it shows you the contrast won’t quite bear the weight. The distinction is real enough to be suggestive. It isn’t strong enough to settle anything. The word Jesus didn’t use tells us he could have said “better” and didn’t — and then leaves the rest open.