From: Jonathan Robie (jonathan@texcel.no)
Date: Tue Jan 06 1998 - 07:07:44 EST
At 11:43 PM 1/5/98 -0500, David S Mann wrote:
>Mounce (Basics of Biblical Greek) says that the aorist is "undefined;"
>however, other texts indicate that it is punctiliar. Which is true?
Ted,
You have just stepped into one of the great swamps of Greek grammar -
eventually, if you pursue this question to the end, you will wind up
reading about "tense", "aktionsart", and "aspect", which has led to long
and interesting debates here. Without an adequate model of these, you can't
really answer the question of what the aorist means.
Unfortunately, because of these long and interesting debates, people define
the aorist quite differently. I think that there is more disagreement about
the best model for explaining the aorist than there is about the actual
meaning of the passages involved.
Let me oversimplify to save you from falling into the swamp, then you can
explore the whole wonderful swamp at your leisure:
1. One important difference between the tenses is "aspect", the viewpoint
from which the action is described - is it described from the "inside view"
of a participant, or from the "outside view" e.g. of someone looking back
on a completed event?
2. The present "tense" describes an action from the inside, as though you
had a television camera following the action. This is probably easiest to
see in the historical present, which describes a past event as though it
were occuring now: "So yesterday I was sitting in a bar, and this woman
walks in wearing a duck costume, and she says to the bartender...". The
verbs "walks" and "says" are present tense verbs, and invite us to view the
action one step at a time, from the inside, together with the narrator who
has projected himself back to the time of the action. The historical
present is common, especially in Mark. In Greek, the present tense does not
tell you when the action *happened*, it tells you about the time the
speaker is viewing the action from in telling the story.
3. The aorist tense views an action from the outside, as though the
television camera surveys the complete action. In most cases, this action
will be in the past. Whether or not this action is *always* in the past is
a matter of hot debate. (Personally, I think there are times that it is
*not* always in the past, but I am trying to avoid opening that can of
worms...)
4. The imperfect, like the present, views an action from the inside.
Now if you really want to jump into the swamp, I have a paper I can send
you...
Jonathan
___________________________________________________________________________
Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com
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