Jason Hare wrote:It's interesting that Matthew uses the present participle while Luke uses the aorist, given that they are parallel accounts of the same parable. It seems that ὁ ἀκούων and οἱ ἀκούσαντες refers to the same group of people. One could generalize it to πᾶς ὁ ἀκούων even (to make it relevant to the OP's πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων). It would seem that context needs to determine whether or not we should take πιστεύων in any kind of continuous sense, not just the form itself. Certainly we would not think that the one who hears in verse 22 of the Matthew passage, for instance, is someone who continuously believes. It is certainly someone who believed the message only for a limited time, yet Matthew employed the present participle.
Hi Jason, no. present participles are always imperfective and aorist participles are always perfective. The situation you're seeing here involves two issues. The first is that the choice of aspect is not dependent on the situation "in the real world," but only on how the author wants to present the situation. But we also have the challenge of a very fine distinction between the English progressive aspect and the Greek imperfective aspect.
English and Greek have subtly distinct verbal systems for the category of aspect. In English we have a distinction between a progressive aspect and a non-progressive aspect. Thus, we have a contrast like:
Examples wrote:(1) Rachel is eating dinner (present progressive)
(2) Rachel eats dinner (present non-progressive)
(3) Rachel was eating dinner (past progressive)
(4) Rachel ate dinner (past non-progressive)
You can see here that in English we have a contrast between past and present and progressive and non-progressive. Both progressive, whether present or past, express a situation as both
incomplete and
ongoing. That is to say, in both (1) and (3), Rachel is involved in the process of eating (ongoing) and has not yet finished (incomplete).
Likewise, examples (2) and (4) say nothing whatsoever about whether Rachel is currently eating (non-ongoing), but we do know from them that she has eaten something at some point in the past and has finished it (complete). For our purposes, example (2) is particularly significant for another reason. Of these clauses, example (2) not only suggests that Rachel has eaten in the past and has finished, but that she will likely eat again in the future. Example (2) lends itself the best to having habitual or gnomic meaning. Habitual meaning is not ongoing. It does not express situations that are in progressive, so the English progressive is insufficient for expressing it.
Conversely, the Greek present is not a progressive aspect. It is an imperfective aspect. So while the progressive, as in English, is both
incomplete and
ongoing, the imperfective, like what we have in Greek, only expresses situations that are
incomplete, independent of whether they're ongoing or not. The result of this distinction is that Greek imperfectives
allow for habitual or gnomic interpretations, where the English progressive would not. So we have a situation where the communicative function of present and the aorist overlap with each other.
So in a sense, the answer here is that, yes, both Matthew 18 and Luke 8 are saying "the one who hears" rather than "the one who is hearing (continually)." In both cases, Jesus is present talking about atemporal/gnomic situations and either the choice of the aorist or the present is acceptable.
To summarize then:Greek imperfectives (like the present) may express situations that are incomplete, including (but not limited to): continuous, iterative, habitual, gnomic meanings.
English progressive may express situations that are both incomplete and ongoing: including (but not limited to): continuous and iterative,
but not habitual or gnomic.
Greek aorists may express situations that are complete or "wholistic," including (but not limited to): punctiliar, constative, gnomic.
English non-progressives may express situations that are complete or "wholistic"
or regular, including (but not limited to): punctiliar, constative, gnomic,
and habitual.
So when it comes to Greek present participles, if they don't translate well into English as continuous or ongoing, they're probably either gnomic or habitual, meaning that cannot be expressed with the English progressive. That doesn't mean that the Greek participle isn't imperfective. It means that Greek isn't English.