perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Grammar questions which are not related to any specific text.
chris mathew
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perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by chris mathew »

I would like some help with the Perfect Participle verb - Tetagmenoi (Appointed) - in Acts 13:48. When compared with the - Believed - Aorist Indicative in the same verse, can we confidently say that the Perfect Participle is relatively prior to the Aorist Indicative? I think the context would clearly suggest that it does - the appointing occurs before the believing, I think. However, I was under the impression that when Aorist verb comes as both Indicative and Participle, they are generally contemporaneous. I would like to know if a Perfect Participle when used with an Aorist Indicative, should we consider the Perfect Participle relatively contemporaneous with the Aorist Indicative, or should we consider the Perfect Participle as occurring prior to the Aorist Indicative?
Jonathan Robie
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Hi Chris, and welcome to B-Greek.

First, a little housekeeping:
  • We use full names on B-Greek - if you PM me your name I can change your user name.
  • Since this is about a different passage, I split it into a separate topic
  • When asking about a verse, please quote the verse in Greek.
Here's the verse:
Acts 13:48 wrote:ἀκούοντα δὲ τὰ ἔθνη ἔχαιρον καὶ ἐδόξαζον τὸν λόγον τοῦ κυρίου καὶ ἐπίστευσαν ὅσοι ἦσαν τεταγμένοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον·
Instead of just dropping an answer on you, let's see if we can get there together with a few questions. The first question: what is the relationship between the verb ἐπίστευσαν and the clause ὅσοι ἦσαν τεταγμένοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον?

Hint: τίς ἐπίστευσαν;

The second question: given that relationship, what does that tell you about the relative time of the two verbs?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
chris mathew
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by chris mathew »

My name is Chris Mathew. (I can't PM you since the system is saying that I need to be more active on the forums before I can PM you! :( )
I am grateful for you sharing the verse. I haven't learnt Greek, except whatever I have taught myself (you can imagine how that's gone :lol: )
chris mathew
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by chris mathew »

The clause is a dependent clause, and so it occurs prior to the verb believed.

Please feel free to correct me. My knowledge of the Greek is limited to what I have tried to teach myself from a few books and the internet. So I know there is a greater chance that I may be wrong than right about this. Again, Please feel free to correct me.
Jonathan Robie
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by Jonathan Robie »

chris mathew wrote: August 13th, 2021, 10:37 am My name is Chris Mathew. (I can't PM you since the system is saying that I need to be more active on the forums before I can PM you! :( )
I am grateful for you sharing the verse. I haven't learnt Greek, except whatever I have taught myself (you can imagine how that's gone :lol: )
Thanks, I just changed your user name. Your password is unchanged.

B-Greek is a forum for people who know or are at least learning Greek. If you want to pursue Greek, we can help you find ways to do so, but we don't want to become a place where we provide authoritative answers in response to questions for people who are not learning Greek. Do you at least know how to read the letters? What have you learned so far?

I will answer this one question, regardless, and I imagine others will weigh in. Here's the way I first read the clause:

v ἐπίστευσαν
s
s ὅσοι
v ἦσαν τεταγμένοι
+ εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον·

ὅσοι ἦσαν τεταγμένοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον· is the subject of the verb ἐπίστευσαν. Who believed? All who were appointed to eternal life.

Now let's look at your question:
chris mathew wrote: August 13th, 2021, 7:02 am However, I was under the impression that when Aorist verb comes as both Indicative and Participle, they are generally contemporaneous. I would like to know if a Perfect Participle when used with an Aorist Indicative, should we consider the Perfect Participle relatively contemporaneous with the Aorist Indicative, or should we consider the Perfect Participle as occurring prior to the Aorist Indicative?
No, I don't think that's really accurate. An Aorist Indicative generally characterizes a state of affairs completed in the past. A participle does not have time by itself, its time is in relation to an indicative verb. You correctly identified two verbs: τεταγμένοι and ἐπίστευσαν. Because it is in the subject, τεταγμένοι is not part of an adverbial phrase that modifies ἐπίστευσαν, it is part of the subject. It describes the people who believed.

But there is another indicative verb in the subject clause: ἦσαν, which is imperfect. So effectively, ἦσαν and τεταγμένοι act together to form one verb in the subject - many translations say "were appointed" or something like that.

τεταγμένοι is a middle-passive form, the grammar doesn't tell you whether to read it as a middle or as a passive, I think most English translations give it a passive force - they "were appointed." I'd be interested in hearing from people who read it as middle - how would you construe this?

And there's at least one other reasonable way to read this:

v ἐπίστευσαν
s
s ὅσοι
v ἦσαν τεταγμένοι
+ εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον·

In that reading, they "believed unto eternal life" - who believed? those who were appointed (to believe).

The Exegetical Summaries give a range of different views on the best way to interpret this. I will reformat it slightly to use numbered bullet points, one for each view they mention. The square brackets indicate the commentaries they are summarizing.
QUESTION—What is meant by ‘as many as were appointed to eternal life believed’?

Note: Each of these is one possible way to answer the question that is found in some commentaries.
  1. The Greek word τάσσω means ‘appoint/assign/designate/ordain.’ Here the passive voice τεταγμένοι ‘were appointed’ indicates that God does the assigning [Bar, BECNT, CBC, NICNT].
  2. This phrase refers to God’s sovereign work over salvation, where God has assigned those who come to eternal life [BECNT, CBC, PNTC, TH, TRT].
  3. Gentiles took an active role in believing, in committing themselves to Christ; but it was in response to God’s Spirit moving in them, convicting them, appointing them for life. All salvation is ultimately only by the grace of God [NAC].
  4. Those who believed are described as those who were ordained to eternal life. This indicates that not all the Gentiles in the town believed the gospel. It could be taken in the sense that God had predestinated certain of them to believe. But it could also refer to those who had already put their trust in God in accordance with the Old Testament revelation of his grace and were enrolled in his people, or perhaps it means that the Gentiles believed in virtue of the fact that God’s plan of salvation included them. Whatever be the precise nuance of the words, there is no suggestion that they received eternal life independent of their own act of conscious faith [TNTC].
Cheng, B., & Stutzman, R. (2017). An Exegetical Summary of Acts 1–14 (pp. 395–396). Dallas, TX: SIL International.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Jonathan Robie
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Jonathan Robie wrote: August 13th, 2021, 1:23 pm τεταγμένοι is a middle-passive form, the grammar doesn't tell you whether to read it as a middle or as a passive, I think most English translations give it a passive force - they "were appointed." I'd be interested in hearing from people who read it as middle - how would you construe this?
I found Carl Conrad's answer to this question in an earlier thread on this topic:
cwconrad wrote: January 9th, 2013, 2:39 pm Yes. That is to say, it can be argued legitimately either way, although those who take it one way rather than the other will tell you that it could only be the way they take it. My own way of expressing this ambivalent sense of τεταγμένοι εἰσίν is with a hyper-literal English version, "they are lined up (for salvation)." That is to say, the form τεταγμένοι εἰσίν really doesn't indicate whether the subject(s) are responsible for their being "lined up" or whether some external force or agency has put them into this lineup.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Jonathan Robie
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by Jonathan Robie »

chris mathew wrote: August 13th, 2021, 10:53 am The clause is a dependent clause, and so it occurs prior to the verb believed.
It's not in a dependent clause that modifies the verb believed, it is part of the subject. It describes the people who believed, I think the time relations need to be inferred from the meaning of the subject and the verb.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
chris mathew
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by chris mathew »

Thank you for changing my username.

Yes, I can read Greek. I have the ESV and NASB/NIV Reverse Interlinears, along with the Apostolic Bible Polyglot to help me recognize what the meaning of the words in the Greek are, and the parsing in those Interlinears help with my personal attempts at translation. I have both an Introduction to Biblical Greek by Raymond A Martin and Daniel B Wallace's Greek Grammar beyond the Basics (all books in hardcopy). Besides these, I also have BDAG lexicon (hardcopy) to help me with the Greek.

I am not a pastor. Just a student of the Word who realized the importance of studying the Greek. I take Bible studies for a few churches in my area (one Calvinist Pentecostal church, two Arminian Brethren churches and one Evangelical church). I recently gave a short explanation of this verse Acts 13:48 in one of the churches - basically stating that since the term tetagmenoi could be read as middle or passive, I would explain the contextual possibilities for both view points. However, I had not yet understood whether to see the Pluperfect? tense of had been appointed to be understood as occurring antecedent to the believed or whether it was to be understood as contemporaneously with it.

I am grateful for the help you have given me in this regard.
Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

chris mathew wrote: August 14th, 2021, 6:06 am Yes, I can read Greek.
Let's suppose someone can read English words, word by word, parse them, find them in a dictionary and find glosses for another language and then translate the result word by word into the other language. Would you say he can read English?

Those who write here regularly usually think that reading means fluent or at least semi-fluent reading, especially without an interlinear. Most people need a dictionary every now and then and at least I need some parsing help every now and then. Way too often, to be honest, and I'm far from fluent. But I recommend a Reader's Edition rather than an interlinear.

Your questions reveal that you handle Greek differently than you handle other human languages. You don't read and understand, you analyze bit by bit and then try to understand the bits you analyzed, then trying to draw the analysis together. That's not worthless and may be even necessary sometimes but it isn't reading or knowing Greek.

In my opinion there's nothing in the Greek here which couldn't be seen in the English if you just read it. "Appointed" is not appointed by oneself. The time of appointing can be seen in the English, too, when it's read naturally. It would be far stretched to say that appointing happened after believing or even contemporaneously.

I see the structure this way:

ὅσοι ἦσαν τεταγμένοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον works like a subject of the sentence for our purposes. ("As many as were appointed, believed" works as a sentence).

The participle τεταγμένοι works like an adjective, not as "dependent verbal" (see Wallace).

The main verb in that clause, ἦσαν, is contemporaneous with believing. τεταγμένοι refers to an event which happened in the past, with present results, but so that the moment which ἦσαν refers to is the "present" and time before that is the "past". Appointing had happened before these described events.

The voice system of Koine is important to grasp, especially because we have now a better modern linguistically based explanation for it. Greek is a two voice system, not three. Active and mediopassive or middle-passive. Middle-passive marks (this is simplified!) "subject affectedness", i.e. the grammatical subject is affected by the event. Middle is actually more central than passive; passive is just a special case of subject affectedness where the subject is only a patient and there's someone/something else acting as an agent. When the form is ambiguous it's not even always necessary to know if it's semantically passive (external agent) or middle (self-affected, spontaneous etc.). It may be enough to know the subject is affected.

(Then there's the question of deponency: what it means and if it exists at all. Don't trust anyone who says a deponent is something in form and something else in meaning.)

Usually the translations handle middle/passive correctly so that the essential meaning is seen in English or another translation language if read naturally. If you want to dig deeper, read the BAGD/BDAG entry for that word carefully and note how it handles the middle-passive forms. Usually it grasps well how the native speakers understood the voice with that specific lexeme (interpretation depends heavily on the lexeme because different verb lexemes have different properties which affect this). If you want to go even deeper, read https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/296246183.pdf for maybe the most up to date linguistic account.
Daniel Semler
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Re: perfect participle in Acts 13:48

Post by Daniel Semler »

I really haven't studied the periphrastic constructions with the participle nearly enough, but isn't this essentially a pluperfect in periphrastic form ?
And thus aren't you really constrained to see this as being antecedent to belief, because you have a speaker describing events, when the belief happened/occurred/began, and that belief beginning under the prevailing effects of another event already past at that time with ongoing consequences also at that time.

Thx
D
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