[B-Greek] Once For All Time - Luke 18:9-14
Richard Ghilardi
qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
Sun Jul 5 23:54:37 EDT 2009
Hello Folks,
I will focus on the last two vss of this parable.
Lk 18:13-14 -- hO DE TELWNHS MAKROQEN hESTWS OYK HQELEN OYDE TOYS
OFQALMOYS EPARAI EIS TON OYRANON, ALL' ETYPTEN TO STHQOS AYTOY LEGWN, hO
QEOS, hILASQHTI MOI TWi hAMARTWLWi. LEGW hYMIN, KATEBH hOYTOS
DEDIKAIWMENOS EIS TON OIKON AYTOY PAR' EKEINON
Next I give a recent (2001) interpretation of these vss and the parable
by a man that I have a great deal of respect for. Yet he does seem to
miss the boat here. He writes in part:
<< Jesus' first verb, hILASQHTI, is the aorist passive imperative from
hILASKOMAI, "to propitiate," meaning here "be propitiated [now and
forever]." (brackets are the author's - RG) ... I would suggest that
Jesus' tax collector is praying: "Look upon me mercifully, now and
forever -- the sinner that I am -- ... Jesus' second verb, DEDIKAIWMENOS,
the perfect passive participle from DIKAIW, "to justify," means literally
"having been justified." The force of the perfect tense in Greek is to
represent an action as complete whose finished result continues to exist.
Here Jesus teaches the instantaneous once-for-all-time justification of
the penitent sinner through the instrumentality of the simple prayer of
faith that looks for God's forgiveness on the ground of the shed blood of
the sacrifice. >>
Now I have been around the B-Greek list long enough to know that view of
the aorist and perfect forms adopted above is now considered to be
linguistically passe having given way to newer theories of verbal aspect.
I looked at what Wallace has to say about the aorist and perfect and
while I understood what he was saying and that he rejected the above
understanding of the aorist and perfect, I could not see how Wallace's
(and others) view might be applied to the two verbs in this passage.
So my question is: If the above author's claims about the aorist and
perfect cannot be substantiated, what can we claim about these two verbal
forms that will help us understand what Jesus is teaching in this
parable?
Yours in His grace,
Richard Ghilardi - qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
West Haven, Connecticut USA
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