[B-Greek] John 1:12 ELABON and EDWKEN

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Sep 20 05:48:32 EDT 2010


On Sep 19, 2010, at 11:42 PM, Oun Kwon wrote:

> John 1:12
> hOSOI DE ELABON AUTON EDWKEN AUTOIS ECOUSIAN TEKNO QEOU GENESQAI
												TEKNA
> 
> The verbs ELABON and EDWKEN in aorist as translated in English past tense
> (received; gave) make me confused of what does this sentence say - why in
> past tense? Perhaps what the Greek describe is not at all about something
> happened in the past, does it?
> 
> It seems I need someone lecturing on me about 'aorist'.

Well, it may be that one can know too little or too much about the aorist. Etymology is not always
the best guide, but the adjective AORISTOS/ON does mean something like "indeterminate." In the
indicative the aorist ordinarily describes an event in the past, but that doesn't mean that its efficacy
has terminated; in the case of a "gnomic" aorist, as in a lab report on a sequence of steps in an
experiment, the account of what "occurred" is implicitly an account of what "does occur" when the
same procedure is followed again.


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






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