Peter Streitenberger wrote:Dear Mike,
It sounds, though, like you're currently lopsided toward one side of the debate. I would encourage your to read the other side as well.
That is true on the one hand. I try to understand one side completely, that's why I've read these authors first. Right now I'm reading Rijksbaron's "Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek" - unfortunately not very detailed in this matter so far. Then I want to go further with alternative authors, but I've no clue which one gives the best answers to the ideas of Porter, Campbell et al.
Maybe you could give me a interesting suggestion?
Thank you in advance !
Yours
Peter, Germany
Fanning is probably the most articulated alternative, but like Rijksbaron, does not dialog with Porter at all. Fanning's work was being written at the same time as Porter so they do not interact with each other. Likewise Rijksbaron is centrally focused on language description rather than on controversial questions (also the first edition of his book was published well before Porter).
In terms of responding to Porter's work, I would recommend Steve Runge's articles, papers, and blog posts and he deals with some of these issues in his recently published grammar. His blog posts summarize much of what it in his published works as well as in his academic conference papers:
On Porter, Prominence, and Aspect. McKay is somewhat in the middle between the two views, though his book
A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek is hard to come by. And then there's a absolutely scathing review of Porter's monograph/dissertation in the 1995 volume of Mnemosyne written by C. J. Ruijgh. T. V. Evans in his book
Verbal Syntax in the Greek Pentateuch also presents a critique of the tenseless view of Ancient Greek.
Part of the challenge is that much of the criticism of the tenseless view has not appeared in books, but in journal articles. And thus, its largely unaccessible to most new students who are beginning to come into the debate. There are a journal articles in the journal
Filologia Neotestamentaria, but I'd have to look up their titles that would be relevant.
I've also (relatively recently) posted here on B-Greek a list of issues that hold me back from accepting a tenseless view of the language. You are more than welcome to read them and comment on them, if you'd like:
Remoteness & Tense (which reminds me, I need to reply to Randall Buth's most recent words there).
I hope that's helpful. Currently, both sides have dug themselves in for the duration and I doubt any agreement will be arrived at for many, many years to come unfortunately.