At 8:50 AM -0500 10/14/97, Perry L. Stepp wrote: >I would consider the aorist in Eph 4.11 a culminative aorist (using Brooks >and Winbery's categories): the emphasis is on a past action with present >results, almost a perfect. Thus possibly "He has given . . ." I don't repudiate the term at all; it seems useful, but I think it's worth noting that this usage appears to be an instance of the fusion of the older Aorist and Perfect tenses. Only the evangelist John uses the perfect tense in the rich traditional sense of a stative verb with considerable regularity. The linguistic historians (or historical linguists?) point out that there are far fewer perfect tenses in Koinˇ precisely because the "culminative" sense of the perfect tense has been taken over by the aorist (the reverse has happened where the Romance language perfect tense formed with an auxiliary verb "have" and a participle is termed (French) passˇ indˇfini, a term which means precisely the same thing as the word AORIST in Greek). The Latin development, whereby the Perfect and aorist tenses fused into a single tense had taken place a lot earlier. I don't know if anyone else cares about this little nugget of the linguistic history of Greek, but I find it fascinating. Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics/Washington University One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018 Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/