Are Greek Verbs Not Marked Temporally Even In Indicative Clauses?

Rodney J. Decker rdecker at bbc.edu
Wed Mar 3 12:21:15 EST 1999


This has been debated on b-greek previously (and at some length at times!).
The nontemporal nature of the Greek indicative verb has been argued
extensively by Stanley Porter (*Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the NT*; see
summary in his *Idioms of NT Greek*) and by K. L. McKay (numerous journal
articles). Richard Young's *Intermediate NT Greek* has also adopted this
model. My dissertation work was to test this theory in Mark's gospel
(concl., in brief, is that Porter's model adequately handles the data in
Mark). For those curious, the abstract and some excerpts are available at
<http://faculty.bbc.edu/RDecker/rd_rsrc.htm#Dissertation>.

>Dear members, 
>I learned BG tense and aspect by reading M. Zerwick's "Biblical
>Greek- illustrated by examples". I was impressed by the constant
>emphasis that "present", "aorist", "imperfect", "perfect" refer to
>aspect, not tense. It seems to say that even "future" has some volitional 
>element and would have been derived from subjunctive. Even in English,
>"I will go" has some volitional element, while "he will go" may not. 
>
>But "aorist" and "present" aspects have temporal significance
>when they are used in independent indicative sentences. But because 
>"present" verb forms can be used to describe future situations,
>and "future" verb forms acquired future time value accidentally, only 
>aorist indicative has [+past] feature.  Why would it be? Zerwick simply
>says that it is exception. 
>
>Is it possible that "aorist"'s semantic meaning involves only aorist 
>aspect, but when used to describe historic situations it acquires temporal
>significance pragmatically? 




****************************************************
Rodney J. Decker, Th.D.       Baptist Bible Seminary
Dept. of NT    P.O. Box 800, Clarks Summit, PA 18411
http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/
The *Resources for NT Study* page is accessible at:
http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/rd_rsrc.htm
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