[B-Greek] GEGONEN and the imperfect HN

Barry nebarry at verizon.net
Wed Jan 11 22:49:29 EST 2006


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mondo Pascal" <mondofive at hotmail.com>
To: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 1:24 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] GEGONEN and the imperfect HN


>I had posted this once already, but I think that it may have been overlooked
> by some because of the heading it was under, so I'm going to post it again,
> though rewritten.
>
> I had been looking at Wieland's textual comments on John 1:3-4 with hO
> GEGONEN and I noticed that he cited Metzger as noting that the imperfect HN
> was out of place with the perfect GEGONEN.
>
> As the perfect will sometimes function purely as an aorist, though making
> the image more vivid.  It seems me that if we consider this as John's intent
> with the passage, the issue really goes away.
>
> Any thoughts?

1.  In Metzger's textual commentary, he doesn't really say it is out of place, 
but suggests that some ancients readers saw the imperfect with GEGONEN 
difficult, and so wrote ESTIN instead, and then goes on to state the parallelism 
with the second HN "seems to require the first."

2.  I think we need to be careful about these kind of precise tense 
distinctions.  Often, the reader who is somewhat less familiar with Greek at 
only the beginning/intermediate level (when reliance on grammars is heavy), 
invests too much in the "standard" definitions of the tense usage/sequence of 
tenses, when in fact it may simply be an idiomatic usage, or an application of 
the grammar in context that does not imply the textbook distinction.  It could 
simply amount to stylistic preference...

3.  Here, however, I think the difficulty may be overstated.  If in fact the 
relative clause HO GEGONEN is seen as the subject of HN, this relieves any 
difficulty in sequence of tenses.  "That which came into existence" (the use of 
the perfect indicating that the coming into existence is viewed in its entirety) 
"in him *was* life."  The second clause is used predicatively to define the 
relative clause, to state what it in fact it is, but the imperfect is used to 
describe in terms of what it "was" when it came into existence.  It thus natural 
to put the verb into the imperfect to express the fact that the life came into 
existence at a particular point in time in the past.

4.  Of course, if we punctuate with the stop after GEGONEN, the difficulty 
vanishes even more neatly...  :)

N.E. Barry Hofstetter
Adjunct Faculty, The Center for Urban Theological Studies
         Philadelphia, PA
http://www.cuts.edu
Visiting Faculty, Reformed Theological Seminary
         Washington, D.C.
http://www.rts.edu/campuses/washington_dc/index.cfm

And me:
http://mysite.verizon.net/nebarry/
http://my.opera.com/BarryHofstetter/blog/

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