Tony Pope wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:
The issue is that the perfect is a present tense, or in more aspectual terms, it refers to the continuing relevance for the speaker of a complete situation. To the extent it refers to a past situation, that situation is usually at some indefinite point in time. That's why it has to be relevant to Jesus's discourse context and that's why the perfect is a poor narrative tense. It is very rare for the perfect not to be relevant to the discourse context in classical Greek and when the NT (along with the papyri) starts using the perfect in more ideal aorist contexts, as here in Matt 13:46, grammarians conclude that there is a confusion or merger of the perfect and the aorist.
Not all grammarians agree with this assessment. K. L. McKay wrote an article in the
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies (Vol 12 1965 1-21) entitled 'The Use of the Ancient Greek Perfect down to the Second Century A. D.' in which he argued that the case for the perfect to be viewed as aoristic in the early centuries AD has been overstated. The breakdown of the classical uses was later than is commonly claimed.
Thanks for citing McKay's work. This article is important in that it takes on, successfully in my opinion, Chantraine's view that the Greek perfect could be "resultative" in the state of the object (note that Chantraine uses the term "resultative" differently than people do now). Rather, he calls for an analysis that would make perfects of active transitives reflect a change in status of the subject -- a view that would be called "experiential" in today's terminology (by some at least).
As for the position about the overstatement of what might be called "aoristic perfects" in the early centuries, he does not really cite any evidence for that. What he has is a brief analysis of Rev 5:7 where he analogizes (I think) the use of the perfect to that of the historical present, suggesting that these "dramatic perfects" have a similar meaning as the historical presents. Then he predicts that all apparent "aoristic perfects" in the early centuries of our era can be explained that way. I'm not persuaded.
The analogy just does not work for me. The dramaticness of a historical present, to the extent it exists, comes not only from the shift in the deictic center but also in its application to punctual events. This does not apply to the perfect, where even with a shift of deictic center, the event is still complete at some undefined point before the deictic center. Also, the perfect is supposed to be about the resulting state (or status as McKay argued) and that is not a punctual event, so it's hard to see much dramaticness coming from that. Finally, although there's lots of evidence of historical presents in Greek, there isn't really any evidence of historical perfects (for want of a better term) outside of the "aoristic perfects" that McKay wants to reanalyze, and McKay didn't cite any as far as I could tell.
Tony Pope wrote:
Similar, and more convenient, is McKay's A New Syntax of the Verb, §4.5.2, where he discusses both εἴληφεν in Rev 5.7 (which, to my mind, is a very telling example of a perfect that is wrongly claimed as aoristic) and πέπρακεν in Matt 13.46.
"In Mt 13:46 πέπρακεν is similarly the climactic action, whether the parable is regarded as a narrative tale or as a timeless statement."
McKey's syntax is checked out of the library at the moment, but as I recall, it is fairly short on analysis, unlike his articles. I think the quoted sentence exhausts the analysis of this verse, right? At any rate, I feel that the idea that πέπρακεν is for "climactic action" buys into the analogy with the historical present, which as I explained above really does not work for me.
Tony Pope wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:
To be sure, there may well be extenuating circumstances explaining this unusual use of the perfect. This verb πιπράσκω appears to have lost its aorist form in the Koine (it should have been ἔπρασεν), so maybe the perfect was simply the closest past-ish tense that was available to be used. Some manuscripts even change the this verb to the more common ἐπώλησεν, which, one should note, is the aorist of πωλέω, not its perfect.
I originally thought this way too: there was apparently no aorist active current for πιπράσκω, so Matthew might be substituting πέπρακεν for an aorist. But Matthew does use πωλέω in other places (including the aorist imperative in 19.21) so there's really no reason to suppose he would not have used ἐπώλησεν if he wanted a plain unvarnished aorist.
The fact that later scribes changed πέπρακεν to ἐπώλησεν is nothing unusual. Interchange between perfect and aorist is common in the NT textual tradition, as also between imperfect and aorist. There's a loss of meaning when changing to a default tense.
I woudl say that the explanation is lexical. My sense is that πέπρακεν is more intensive than πωλέω (e.g., compare "sell off" and "sell"), so this verb really is a better fit for the context, despite its lack of the aorist and needing to supply one from the perfect. My impression from the study of the textual tradition of Galatians (the subject of my dissertation) is that the confusion of tenses by the scribes is fairly rare, compared to other changes, and more common when the forms are spelled very similarly, which is not the case here.
Tony Pope wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:
Let's look at it another way. Though English uses the perfect more frequently than Greek, English also requires a present perfect to be relevant to the current discourse context. The fact that none of the major translations rendered πέπραχεν with an English present perfect is a redflag that none of these translators (even the very literal NASB) could detect any relevance to the current discourse context. These all translate the verb with the preterite "sold."
The fact that English translations content themselves with "sold" is no argument at all that the perfect in question is equivalent to an aorist. For one thing, it should be well known that the major translations copy those that went before them to a large extent. But more importantly, we are dealing here with a nuance that is hard to reproduce in English translation unless the translator feels free to depart from a "literal" rendering. The previous parable uses historic presents for effect, so it's not surprising that this one also uses a highlighting strategy. I suggest this is a case of what McKay calls in his
BICS article (p. 17) the
dramatic use of the perfect.
I think "no argument at all" is far too strong. The perfect is more frequent in English than in Greek, and it is very good at capturing the nuance of current relevance if it is there. The fact that the translations don't go with (and they are all not slavishly dependent on each other) is a good sign that they did not detect that nuance. But in any event, your argument is that there is a different nuance, other than current relevance. Unfortunately, the notion of a dramatic perfect, as I see it, depends on a specious analogy with the historical present.
One thing is clear to me, though. This is a different use of the perfect than in classical times. Not even McKay (as far as I can tell) has cited evidence of a dramatic perfect in classical times. It was not a narrative tense. And it is in the early centuries around the turn of the millennium that we see the perfect begin to be used in narrative contexts, where the aorist had been reigning.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia