[B-Greek] historical present tense in romans

Eddie Mishoe edmishoe at yahoo.com
Sun Oct 9 11:39:22 EDT 2005


One last, too lengthy, comment for me...

> AS THOUGH they were in-progress also means
> AS THOUGH they were present. 
> (i.e., the historic present momentarily changes the
> deictic center. That is
> what gives it its rhetorical effect, beyond semantic
> aspect or semantic
> tense.)

To equate Aspect (in-progress) with Tense (present) is
a bit strange to my way of thinking (am I
misunderstanding you?), but this I think is the
default starting position of some. It is my contention
that such an assumption is linguistically
indefensible. 

Take for example Porter. He began with this starting
point (although I doubt he ever really held it) and
abandoned the temporal nature of the Greek verbal
system altogether!! But I think he was consistent in
doing so IF his starting point were legitimate (there
are too many exceptions to the "rules"). But it is not
in my opinion. 

Wallace assumes the same starting point. And by so
doing, he sees something in the morphology of the
Greek Verb called "Gnomic"!! He has a "Gnomic Present"
for example. How does one see "gnomicity" (if I may
invent a word) in the morphology of a verb?? The
answer in my opinion is: you can't. You can have a
gnomic proposition, but you cannot have a gnomic
Present or Aorist.

The solution (to combine the best of both worlds)
would be to see Time/Tense as relative, relative to
a(n authorial developed) deictic center. Just like we
experience in English when recounting some historical
event (we describe it with Present Tenses interspersed
throughout). The "Historical" Present (better, the
Historical Proposition) is a common feature in
language, more so when spoken.

A perfect example is the famous "the grass withers"
where we find an Aorist Tense inside a gnomic
proposition. For some, they completely revamp the
Greek Verbal system because the author (who had to use
some tense) used an Aorist. They assume that somehow
this Aorist Tense means "gnomic." Better to make no
temporal assessments on this Aorist since it is used
in a gnomic proposition (and the author also uses
Presents in similar propositions)! What we can
conclude is this: a Greek writer was free to use any
tense in a gnomic expression.

Finally, I would say that the Present Tense of the
Indicative in Greek does not mean "now-time." (This
seems to be a persistent error among many.) That is,
the Present Tense does not ipso facto mean "the
absolute present time." It certainly can be used for
"now-time," (and would naturally be used such) but the
tense's inherent, semantic feature is not an
"absolute" WHEN (always referencing "now-time"), but a
"relative" WHEN. And the author must FIRST develop the
relative WHEN (context) before the Present Tense can
assume a role (or be analyzed). Getting back to "the
grass withers." Before we analyze what an Aorist does
(as far as its temporalness), we must first understand
the nature of the proposition itself, or the genre
(narrative or not, etc.). In "the grass withers," the
author is not making a time-based statement (it's
gnomic). So, a Time-based verbal system must be given
the freedom to handle such non-temporal propositions.
Since the author is required to use some verb in this
proposition, we should not then redefine the
Tense-based system based on which tense he uses, since
he could use (and does use) another.

Anyway, not being a trained linguist, that's about as
far as I can take this. Where is (other than in the
archives) Rolf Furuli, Kimmo Huovila, Mari Olsen, Mark
Wilson, etc.???? Not that they agree with me, but they
help me think through the issues from a linguistic 
point of view.


Eddie Mishoe
Pastor


	
		
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