[B-Greek] Once For All Time - Luke 18:9-14

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Jul 6 07:27:03 EDT 2009


On Jul 5, 2009, at 11:54 PM, Richard Ghilardi wrote:

> 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?

George has pointed to Mt 18:21-22 as pointing to forgiveness as an  
action to be repeated in the face of repeated offenses; the Lucan  
parallel passage is Lk 16.3. Whether attempting to extrapolate from  
what disciples are exhorted to do and attribute repeated forgiveness  
to God (after all, that's a doctrinal question and off limits to B- 
Greek discussion), I'd like to focus on the grammatical questions  
regarding hILASQHTI in Lk 18:13 and DEDIKAIWMENOS in the following  
verse:

(1) hILASQHTI. It's true that more recent aspect theory (and I think  
this applies to all flavors, whether "vanilla" or "plain brown  
wrapper"or Porter or Fanning or Campbell) looks with disfavor on the  
notion that the aorist indicates a "once for all time" act. In fact,  
however, we need only consider such standard aorist imperatives as  
EIPE MOI or ASPASASQE AUTHN to discern actions that are to be  
accomplished in a particular instance.

(2) DEDIKAIWMENOS. I've expressed my opinion previously that the Koine  
aorist and perfect tenses are in process of assimilation; I'm not  
convinced that DEDIKAIWMENOS carries a meaning differing substantially  
from that of DIKAIWQEIS. Perhaps Richard's friend thinks similarly,  
since he speaks of the perfect participle implying "a once for all  
time justification." But we can readily find instances of the perfect  
wherein completion is clearly implicit but there's no indication of  
the permanence of the action completed: Mk 3:1 tells of  
anἄνθρωπος ἐξηραμμένην ἔχων τὴν  
χεῖρα [EXHRAMMENHN ECWN THN CEIRA]. EXHRAMMENHN indicates the  
state of the man's hand, but subsequent verses tell of the restoration  
of the man's hand (3:5 λέγει τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ·  
ἔκτεινον τὴν χεῖρα. καὶ ἐξέτεινεν  
καὶ ἀπεκατεστάθη ἡ χεὶρ αὐτοῦ. LEGEI  
TWi ANQRWPWi: EKTEINON THN CEIRA. KAI EXETEINEN KAI APEKATESTAQH hH  
CEIR AUTOU]. (We may note in this verse also that the command to hold  
out the hand hardly implies that the hand should be held out forever.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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