>I would consider the aorist in Eph 4.11 a culminative aorist (using
Brooks
>and Winbery's categories): the emphasis is on a past action with
present
>results, almost a perfect. Thus possibly "He has given . . ."
I don't repudiate the term at all; it seems useful, but I think it's
worth noting that this usage appears to be an instance of the fusion of
the older Aorist and Perfect tenses. Only the evangelist John uses the
perfect tense in the rich traditional sense of a stative verb with
considerable regularity. The linguistic historians (or historical
linguists?) point out that there are far fewer perfect tenses in Koinˇ
precisely because the "culminative" sense of the perfect tense has been
taken over by the aorist (the reverse has happened where the Romance
language perfect tense formed with an auxiliary verb "have" and a
participle is termed (French) <italic>passˇ indˇfini</italic>, a term
which means precisely the same thing as the word AORIST in Greek). The
Latin development, whereby the Perfect and aorist tenses fused into a
single tense had taken place a lot earlier. I don't know if anyone else
cares about this little nugget of the linguistic history of Greek, but
I find it fascinating.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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