Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 48:3 (Sep 2005)
Article: The Meaning Of The Tenses In New Testament Greek: Where Are We?
Author: Robert E. Picirilli

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JETS 48:3 (September 2005) p. 533

The Meaning Of The Tenses In New Testament Greek:
Where Are We?

Robert E. Picirilli

Robert Picirilli is professor emeritus at Free Will Baptist Bible College, 3606 West End Avenue, P.O. Box 50117, Nashville, TN 32505–0117.

I. Introduction

The world of scholarship about the Greek verb is in ferment, and the outcome promises to have a significant effect for all of us who interpret the NT. Since about 1990 there has been a paradigm shift in understanding the Greek tenses,1 and, as George Guthrie has observed on this subject, "We do not care for people messing with our paradigms."2 Even so, we are being asked to reexamine some strongly-entrenched assumptions about how we understand and exegete the Greek verb. My purpose in this paper is to provide an introduction to the new paradigm, called "verbal aspect" theory, and to survey the issues that are involved and in need of resolution. I do so believing that this theory, though some refinements may still be called for, is worthy of broad acceptance and suffers from limited exposure among many who need it most.

First, a word is in order about the traditional understanding of the tenses that most of us once assumed was settled for good. At the risk of oversimplification, the prevailing view, for more than a generation, was that the primary meaning of the tenses was "kind of action," often called Aktionsart. Most traditional texts developed this view: namely, that the present and imperfect indicate "linear" action, while the aorist indicates "punctiliar" action or action undefined ("aorist" = without boundary), and the perfect tenses a continuing state resulting from a prior act. This, we were taught (and taught our students in turn), is the primary meaning common to the tenses in all verbal forms. In addition, the tenses have secondary implications for time: absolutely in the indicative (the present tense typically indicates present time and the imperfect and aorist past time, for example) and relatively in participles (present and aorist participles typically indicate time contemporaneous with or antecedent to that of the main verb, respectively). This view,

JETS 48:3 (September 2005) p. 534

with variations, can be found in most of the grammars from which many of us learned Greek, including those by Robertson; Blass, Debrunner, and Funk; or Dana and Mantey.3

Against this, the new view is that the tenses mean, primarily or exclusively, verbal aspect (to be denned below) rather than kind of action. This view first came to the attention of many...

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