Rethinking Greek Verb Tenses in Light of Verbal Aspect: How Much Do Our Modern Labels Really Help Us?

Introduction As an important foundation to theological education in our colleges and seminaries, the study and teaching of biblical Greek constitutes a challenging task as the student of the Greek New Testament (NT) is required to master a variety of grammatical forms and their functions. One of the more significant grammatical features of Greek that demands the student’s (and teacher’s) attention is the Greek tense system, not least of all because it differs so widely from the English tense system. In elementary Greek students are taught forms and basic nuances of the different Greek tenses (present, imperfect, future, aorist, perfect, pluperfect) along with general translational glosses. If the student advances to a second year Greek grammar and syntax class, he/she will sooner or later spend time acquiring a variety of labels which are supposed to reflect actual usages and meanings of the various Greek tenses, but which also have ostensible exegetical payoff. Thus, students acquire as part of their working “grammatical” vocabulary such labels as “progressive present,” “conative present,” “ingressive imperfect,” “conative imperfect,” “ingressive aorist,” “constative aorist,” “consummative aorist,” “intensive perfect,” and so on. Grammatical analysis of verbs, then, consists partly of finding an appropriate label for each verb encountered in a given text. These labels are time-honored ones and appear in virtually every intermediate and advanced NT Greek grammar book (as well as a