Re.: Default aorist
DWILKINS@ucrac1.ucr.edu
Fri, 1 Nov 1996 12:56:42 -0800 (PST)
I appreciate the clarification, Rod, but what you said is what I thought you
would say, and I don't find it satisfying (my apologies for not reproducing the
text, which I can not do on this server in any efficient way).
The reason Jude 14 doesn't work for me is that we can't be certain what Jude
is referring to, and in any case a prophetic statement can be cast in the past
to emphasize certainty or perhaps just for the poetic value. As for John 13,
you seem to want to make the aorist plus NUN equivalent to MELLW plus the fut.
infinitive. But your choice of making the statements in question parallel
rather than contrastive simply begs the question contextually (unless you have
convincing evidence for your interpretation), and threatens to reek havoc with
the system of tenses, particularly in narrative. I will grant that adverbs like
NUN can have very significant effects on our interpretation of a verb in a
given context, but that is a very different thing than saying that the tense
itself has no temporal meaning in the indicative.
I have to run or I might say more at this point, but when you close by saying
that you did not intend to 'prove' that aorists can be future-referring, what
am I to make of your desire "only to cite a few instances of such"? Surely this
is begging the question, unless you infer that those like myself who may dis-
agree should simply accept this theory as fact. I don't mean to imply that I
take any offense (and hope that I am not offending you in turn), but just that
we need to "back up the truck" first.
Don Wilkins
UC Riverside