[B-Greek] aorist and its temporal reference

furuli at online.no furuli at online.no
Sat Jan 24 13:05:35 EST 2004


Der Con,

Thank you for your comments. I would like to add a few words. In his 
chapter 3, Porter shows that in 80-90 % of the cases the LXX renders 
Hebrew perfect and consecutive imperfect with aorist. Porter seems to 
accept the traditional view of consecutive imperfect. If my analysis 
of consecutive imperfect as imperfective and not perfective is 
correct, this puts the aorists of the LXX in a completely different 
light. In that case, thousands of aorists translate Hebrew 
imperfective verbs and not only perfective ones. The consequence of 
this would be that when we look to the NT to find the temporal 
reference of the aorists, we need not only consider translation 
Greek, but also allusions, and even the very language of each writer. 
If an NT writer had Hebrew as his mother tongue, was that language 
closer to Classical Hebrew, which I ascribe as an aspect language, or 
to Mishnaic Hebrew, which all agree is a tense language? And 
regardless of the answer, when he read the Classical Hebrew of the 
Hebrew Bible and compared it with the LXX and its aorists, in which 
way would he use the aorist when he wrote his NT book? So my radical 
claim regarding Hebrew verbs may cause the issue to be more 
complicated than it was when Porter wrote his thesis.


Best regards

Rolf

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




>Thanks Rolf for that informative post. Just a couple of acknowledgments re
>methodology... It seems that Rod Decker excludes translation Greek from his
>analysis. See p.95 of his book: 'Of the 518 aorist indicative forms in Mark,
>7 occur in translation Greek and were thus not considered.' Also, speaking
>of less specific Semitic interference, Porter has a whole chapter on the
>issue (Ch.3: ' The Influence of Semitic Languages on Verbal Aspect in the
>New Testament').
>
>While you rightly suggest that the methodology needs to be clarified/sorted
>out, I think there has been consideration of some of the issues you raised.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Con Campbell
>
>Canberra, Australia
>





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