[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects

Con R. Campbell con.campbell at moore.edu.au
Mon Sep 11 08:49:28 EDT 2006


Well, as one who does subscribe to the 'non-tense' view, I don't believe
that context alone that supplies temporal reference. If, say, the aorist
indicative encodes perfective aspect and 'remoteness', its default temporal
reference will be past. The advantage of remoteness over past tense is that
it is capable of explaining non-past usages as well as past usages. So, in
other words, I would assume the temporal reference of the aorist is past,
unless context overrides this, in which case I would look for another way in
which remoteness is expressed (in a non-temporal sense). That means in the
end, there is not that much difference in approach to someone who assumes
past tense, and makes do when context overrides that. It's just that for me,
such cases are in line with the meaning of the aorist rather than contrary
to it.

Con Campbell
Lecturer
Moore College


On 11/9/06 9:43 PM, "wayfaringman at netzero.net" <wayfaringman at netzero.net>
wrote:

> 
> Hello
> 
> I really don't see how time could be expressed in Biblical Greek if
> the verbs were non-temporal. I don't see how the context alone could
> supply the time factor.
> 
> Harry Jones
> 
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