Re: Matt 13:46 perfect πέπρακεν
Posted: March 1st, 2013, 4:01 am
Thanks for clarifying, Stephen. But like Alan, I still don't quite see why the perfect tense form must be relevant to the discourse context of Jesus, nor why a verb cannot be perfect if the action it describes is in a fictional setting. I thought that it was enough for it to be relevant to the context within which it is situated. Besides, there must be a reason why the perfect was chosen over the default aorist, so I am suggesting that the reason is to express a state resulting from an action and not just the action. Or are you saying that there is no reason?Stephen Carlson wrote:The key concept is discourse context. The word "discourse" seems to have dropped from your reply but it is crucial to the point. There are different contexts to look at. On the one hand, you have the context within the storyworld of the parable, where the act of selling everything is certainly relevant to whether the man can afford to buy the pearl. But on the other, there is the discourse context of Jesus, the one who spoke the perfect tense form. There, the man is not present when Jesus told the parable. In fact, he may as well be fictional.
If the perfect in this particular place is identical to the aorist, why is it so unusual to find such "mismatching" tense that we can identify the aorist as the appropriate one? I guess I cannot see why there would be a great disparity in frequency of the aorist and perfect in narrative unless there was a significant disparity in meaning.Stephen Carlson wrote:I know what your point is, but to me your argument has the flavor of "It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, so it's cow." It is the very remoteness of the story time from the discourse time that makes the aorist a more appropriate tense.
Yes that is the explicit expression, so couldn't the perfect be able to pull the reader's focus to that state? Likewise in many of the examples that you cited from BDF? I am suggesting that such a shade of meaning is possible even if atypical and therefore can be what the perfect in these instances mean. I just searched online and found an article describing such an effect used in informal speech in some "dialects" of English: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Vivid+ ... 0176820727. Even so, English is quite inflexible and the present perfect is almost never used in immediate conjunction with the simple past. An example I found in the article that is closest to what we have in Matt 13:46 is (underlining mine):cwconrad wrote:Seems to me that "the state of having nothing left unsold" finds expression rather in πάντα ὅσα εἶχεν
(17) a. I just [...] rang up one morning, said, "I'm not too well so I won't be in today," and went waterskiing, and got burnt. So of course WHEN I'VE COME into work THE NEXT MORNING they said, y'know, "how're you feeling?" (92.9 FM radio Perth, 7.3.00)
In Rev 5:7, could it be that they are conceived in two separate phrases, each from a different perspective; "(And then) he came, and (now) he has taken ..."? The rest from the NT are to me not "unquestionable use of the perfect for the aorist". Do you have an explanation for why any of them should be aoristic and should not mean what I suggest above?cwconrad wrote:BDF343. Perfect for the aorist. There are scattered traces of the late use of the perfect in narrative (§340): (1) unquestionable examples in Rev: 5:7 ἦλθεν καὶ εἴληφεν, cf. 8:5. (2) In Paul: 2 C 2:13 ἔσχηκα in historical narration, 12:17 ἀπέσταλκα among nothing but aorists (ἔπεμψα DE, ἀπέστειλα several minusc.), 11:25 νυχθήμερον ἐν τῷ βυθῷ πεποίηκα alongside aorists only and without adequate reason. J 12:29p66 ἐλάλησεν; pm. λελάληκεν. (3) Γέγονεν for ἐγένετο (Burton 43) Mt 25:6 (B ἐγένετο), 17:2 (according to Chr), γεγόναμεν ApocP 11 (for papyri s. Mlt. 146 [229f.] and an example from an inscrip. 239 n. on 168 [263]).