[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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