[B-Greek] Re: Understanding Greek Verb Tense/Aspect

waldo slusher waldoslusher at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 9 12:33:11 EDT 2004


--- Eddie Mishoe <edmishoe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think I will be asking a very naive question with
> this, but how could one argue that the Greek of the
> New Testament does not have "time" in the
> Indicative?

Eddie:

The answer does not lie in the Greek language itself.
For example, both Porter and Wallace are reading the
same Greek texts. They arrive at different conclusions
based on their APPROACH to languages (i.e.,
linguistics).


Both agree that most Aorist Indicatives indicate past
time, but for different reasons. I would suspect that
given any specific Aorist Indicative usage, both
Porter and Wallace would agree as to WHEN the event
took place. So, after all is said and done, the
temporal nature is observed by both, but WHY a
particular Aorist Indicative indicates a PAST time, or
PRESENT time, will be explained by both scholars
within their given set of preconceived notions of the
behavior of languages.

I think we need to acknowledge that this debate will
not be won or lost on the Greek text battlefield. It's
a linguistic approach that drives one's conclusions.

If you take Porter's linguistic approach, you could
conceivably demonstrate that English is not a temporal
based language. And in fact, if you take Wallace's
approach, you will most likely conclude that English
is a temporal based language....not because of the
English texts he examined, but because he examined
those texts using a particular linguistic approach to
analyzing languages.

Here's my final note. Take this sentence as an English
example (admittedly I am oversimplifying this for the
sake of brevity):

The drawing for the lottery is tomorrow, but as far as
I am concerned, I've won it. It's a done deal.

Here are "past tense" verbs being used of a future
event. If your linguistic approach cannot admit any
exceptions (if one rule must explain all known
occurrences), then "past tense" verbs must be
abandoned. That is an extreme approach, but if one
only slightly varies from that, then their conclusions
will only slightly vary from that.

I didn't want you to lose faith in the integrity of
the Greek language because scholars hold to apparent
opposite positions. There is far more in common than
meets the eye if you take a peek behind the scenes.

The problem is when we assert our temporal position on
the Greek language, we usually forget to itemize all
the preconceived linguistic baggage that drives our
decision making process.

Waldo

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