Tense and Aspect

In English, tense means time. I walk, I walked, I will walk: present, past, future. So when an English speaker opens a Greek grammar and finds forms called the present, the aorist, the imperfect and the perfect, he naturally assumes they are mostly about time too. They are not, or at least not mostly, and on that point nearly every grammarian now writing agrees. What these forms chiefly signal is aspect: the way the writer chooses to present an action.

An illustration helps, as long as you remember it is only an illustration. Imagine two men reporting the same football match. One watched from a seat high in the stand and tells you: the home side won two goals to one. He has presented the whole match as a single thing, seen from outside, start to finish in one view. The other was down by the touchline and tells you: they were pressing forward, the ball was running loose, the crowd was roaring. He has presented the match from inside, as it unfolded, without telling you how it ended. Both are true reports of the same event. What differs is the viewpoint each man chose. In the grammars, the first is called perfective aspect and the second imperfective aspect. The aorist is the perfective form. The present and the imperfect are the imperfective forms. The perfect is disputed, as you will see.

Aspect must be kept separate from a second thing, which the grammars call by the German word Aktionsart, kind of action. Aktionsart is what the action was actually like: a single blow, a repeated knocking, a long reign, a moment of decision. Aspect is a choice the writer makes about how to present it. The same event can be presented either way, as the two football reports show. So the aspect of a verb does not, by itself, tell you whether the action was quick or slow, once or many times. That information comes from the meaning of the verb, from words such as daily or once, and from the story. Almost every misuse of Greek tenses from the pulpit comes from forgetting this one distinction.

And Greek does not line up with English time as neatly as the tense names suggest. In John 1:15 the BSB says 'John testified concerning Him. He cried out'. The Greek verb behind testified is μαρτυρεῖ (martyrei, he testifies), a present, and the verb behind cried out is κέκραγεν (kekragen, he has cried out), a perfect. Both are rendered with English pasts, rightly. Mark 1:21 opens with εἰσπορεύονται (eisporeuontai, they go in), a present in the middle of a past-time story, and the BSB again uses a past. In John 14:3 Jesus says πάλιν ἔρχομαι (palin erchomai, I come again), a present, and the BSB has 'I will come back'. In Romans 8:30 Paul says of God's people that he ἐδόξασεν (edoxasen, he glorified) them, an aorist, of a glory most readers take to be still to come. The question is not whether these verses exist. Everyone agrees they do. The question is what they show about the Greek verb.

For about a century, English-speaking students learned Greek verbs through grammars such as Ernest De Witt Burton's Syntax of the Moods and Tenses in New Testament Greek, James Hope Moulton's Prolegomena (1906), A. T. Robertson's great Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (1914), and H. E. Dana and Julius Mantey's Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament (1927). These books did not ignore what we now call aspect; Moulton brought the idea of Aktionsart into English study of the New Testament from German comparative philology, and all of them insisted that the kind of action mattered more than time outside the indicative mood.

Their account, in outline, ran like this. In the indicative mood the tenses mark time as well as kind of action: the aorist and imperfect indicatives are past, the present indicative present, the future future. In the other moods, the subjunctive, the imperative, the infinitive and usually the participle, the tenses mark only the kind of action. The present was described as linear or durative, action in progress. The aorist was described as punctiliar, action presented as a point. The perfect was described as completed action with continuing results.

This view has real strength, and it should not be dismissed as merely old. It explains the overwhelming pattern of actual use: in the narrative books, the aorist and imperfect indicatives are used almost entirely of past events, and the augment, the ἐ on the front, appears only on those forms and only in the indicative, which looks very much like a marker of past time. It gave generations of preachers a usable system, and much of what it taught about the present and aorist in the non-indicative moods survives intact in the newer accounts. The verses listed at the end of the last section were explained as special uses, the historical present, the futuristic present, the proleptic aorist, each with its own heading and examples.

Its weakness was a word. Punctiliar was meant by the careful grammarians as a description of how the action is presented, as a point, a dot rather than a line. It was very widely heard as a description of the action itself: momentary, instantaneous, done at a stroke. From there it was a short step to once for all, decisive, never to be repeated, and lesson 4 shows how far that step has carried preaching. The grammarians who coined the terms are not responsible for every use made of them, but the vocabulary made the mistake easy.

The modern debate began in earnest in 1989, when Stanley E. Porter published Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood. Kenneth McKay had been arguing for an aspectual approach for some years, later gathered in A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek (1994), but Porter's book was the full-scale theory. Using a school of linguistics called systemic functional linguistics, he argued that the Greek tense-forms do not encode time at all, in any mood, including the indicative.

Porter proposed three aspects. Perfective aspect, expressed by the aorist, presents an action as a complete whole. Imperfective aspect, expressed by the present and the imperfect, presents it as in progress. Stative aspect, expressed by the perfect and pluperfect, presents a state of affairs. The future he treated as a special case, closer to a form expressing expectation than a full aspect. Time, on Porter's account, is not given by the verb form; it is given by the context, by words such as now, yesterday or in those days, and by the kind of text. Aspect is the writer's choice of how to present the action, and it is a subjective choice in the sense that it belongs to the writer, not to the event.

Porter added a second idea that has proved useful in reading whole paragraphs. The aspects differ in prominence. The aorist is the least marked, the ordinary form that carries the backbone of a narrative, which he called the background. The present and imperfect are more marked and bring material forward, the foreground. The perfect is the most marked of all, which he called the frontground, and so a perfect in a passage is often worth a second look.

At its strongest, Porter's case runs like this. The verses in section 1 are not rare exceptions to be filed under special headings. Historical presents are very common in Mark and John. Aorists used of general truths, as in John 15:6, where the BSB says a branch 'is thrown away and withers', translating two aorists with English presents, are a regular feature of the language. Perfects such as οἶδα (oida, I know) have present meaning and no sense of a past act at all. A theory that needs that many exceptions, Porter argues, has the wrong rule. A theory in which the form gives aspect and the context gives time explains every case with one principle. Rodney Decker's study of the verb in Mark (2001) tested this approach across a whole Gospel and found it held.

The case against Porter is also strong. His critics point out that past-referring aorists and imperfects outnumber the alleged exceptions many times over, that the augment appears precisely where past time would be marked and nowhere else, and that a feature can be a real part of a form's meaning and still be overridden by context in special uses, as English present tenses are in 'the bus leaves tomorrow' or in a story told in the present for vividness. On this view, the special uses are just that, special uses, which a speaker of the language recognised exactly because they departed from the normal meaning. Porter's reply is that a frequent pairing is not the same as a meaning: past reference is common with these forms because narrative is about the past, and the many uses that do not fit are the evidence that time is coming from somewhere else.

Buist M. Fanning's Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek appeared in 1990, a year after Porter's book and independently of it. Fanning agrees that aspect is the central meaning of the forms, but he holds that in the indicative the forms also encode time, so that the aorist indicative really is a past form and the historical present really is a special use. He describes aspect as a viewpoint: the present takes an internal viewpoint, looking at the action from within, and the aorist an external viewpoint, looking at it as a whole from outside. He does not treat the perfect as a third aspect of the same kind, but as a combination of features: a resulting state, an action prior to it, and a summary viewpoint. The great strength of Fanning's book is its patient work on how aspect combines with the meaning of each verb. A present of a verb that names a state, such as to know, behaves differently from a present of a verb that names a single act, such as to throw, and Fanning catalogued those combinations across the New Testament. If you want to know why the same form yields a habit in one place and a process in another, his book is where the answer is worked out. His critics, Porter and Campbell among them, reply that by keeping time in the indicative he inherits the older view's long list of special uses, and that his account of the perfect mixes aspect with the kind of action and with time, three things a theory of aspect ought to keep apart.

Constantine R. Campbell's Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative (2007), with a companion volume on the non-indicative forms (2008) and a short introduction for students, Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek (2008), offers a third account. Campbell agrees with Fanning that there are two aspects, perfective and imperfective, and agrees with Porter that time is not encoded in the indicative. In place of time he uses two spatial ideas, remoteness and proximity. The imperfect is imperfective and remote; the present is imperfective and proximate; the aorist is perfective and remote. Most strikingly, he argues that the perfect is not stative but imperfective, with heightened proximity, and the pluperfect imperfective with heightened remoteness. He then shows how these combinations sort themselves in narrative: aorists carry the main line of the story, imperfects supply background and description, and presents in narrative mark out vivid or significant moments.

At its strongest, Campbell's account explains why the augmented forms cluster in past narrative, which is the fact that troubles Porter's critics, without making past time their meaning, which is the claim that troubles Porter. His critics reply that remoteness, in practice, often looks like past time under another name, and that his imperfective perfect has not persuaded most of his colleagues. Porter and Campbell, it should be said, disagree with each other on the perfect as sharply as either disagrees with the older grammars. The discussion has continued in collections such as The Greek Verb Revisited (2016), edited by Steven E. Runge and Christopher J. Fresch, and it is not settled. You do not need to settle it to read the New Testament well.

What you need is the large ground they share, which is far more important for a preacher than the points that divide them. All three, and most of the older grammarians at their most careful, agree on the following. Aspect, the writer's way of presenting the action, is at the heart of the tense-forms. The kind of action, whether single, repeated, sudden or long, comes from the meaning of the verb and from the context, not from the form alone. The aorist does not mean once for all or momentary. The present does not, on its own, mean continuously or habitually. And outside the indicative, the tense-forms say nothing about past or present time; an aorist imperative is not a command about the past. If you hold to those five points you will avoid nearly every error this module warns about, whichever theory you finally prefer.

Now the anchor. The SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) reads πᾶς ὁ γεγεννημένος ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἁμαρτίαν οὐ ποιεῖ (pas ho gegennēmenos ek tou theou hamartian ou poiei, everyone who has been born of God does not do sin). γεγεννημένος (gegennēmenos, having been born) is a perfect passive participle, nominative singular masculine, of γεννάω (gennaō, to beget, and in the passive to be born). ποιεῖ (poiei, he does) is present active indicative, third person singular, of ποιέω (poieō, I do or make). Then: καὶ οὐ δύναται ἁμαρτάνειν (kai ou dynatai hamartanein, and he is not able to sin). δύναται (dynatai, he is able) is present indicative, third person singular, of δύναμαι, tagged middle in the MorphGNT data and middle or passive, or deponent, in other tools, as lesson 1 explained, and ἁμαρτάνειν (hamartanein, to sin) is a present active infinitive of ἁμαρτάνω (hamartanō, I sin). The verse closes with γεγέννηται (gegennētai, he has been born), perfect passive indicative, third person singular.

The KJV renders the key verbs plainly: 'doth not commit sin' and 'he cannot sin'. The BSB has 'refuses to practice sin' and 'cannot go on sinning', and the NIV and NASB similarly bring out an idea of continuing or practising. Those modern renderings are an interpretation, and a well-founded one, of what the presents mean here. The reasoning goes like this. 1 John 1:8 and 2:1 make clear that John expects believers to sin and provides for it. In 2:1 the verbs for sinning are aorist subjunctives, ἁμάρτητε (hamartēte, you should sin) and ἁμάρτῃ (hamartē, he should sin), presenting acts of sin as whole events. In 3:6 and 3:9 the verbs are presents. If the present presents sinning as an ongoing activity, then John is saying that the one born of God does not live in sin as his settled practice, which is fully consistent with 1:8. Many commentators take this view, and translators who adopt it have made the English say it outright.

Here the agreement of the aspect scholars matters, and it cuts in two directions. First, it supports the translators: the present is imperfective, and an imperfective presentation of a verb like sin, in a context about a way of life, naturally yields a habit or practice. Fanning's whole method is built on exactly this kind of combination. Second, it warns against resting the case on the tense alone. The present form does not by itself mean habitually. In 1 John 5:16 John uses a present participle, ἁμαρτάνοντα (hamartanonta, sinning), of a brother whom the church is to pray for, which shows that the present of this verb can describe a believer's sinning. And ἁμαρτάνω in a general statement would very often be present in any case. So the habitual reading is right only if the context makes it right. The strongest form of the argument does not say 'the Greek present means keeps on'. It says: in a letter that has just defined the issue as practising lawlessness (3:4) and belonging to the devil (3:8), and that has already said believers sin (1:8), the imperfective presents of 3:9 are best taken as describing a settled way of life.

That argument persuades most interpreters, but it is not the only reading held by serious Christians, and you should know the others. Some read 3:9 as describing a specific sin, the lawlessness of 3:4, understood as the deliberate rebellion of the false teachers who had left the church, which the true child of God does not commit. Some read it as describing what is true of the new birth as such, the believer's identity as God's child, in tension with the experience of 1:8 until the end. In the Wesleyan tradition, John Wesley read the verse as a real promise that a believer can be kept from wilful, known sin, with sin defined in that narrower way, while still needing Christ's advocacy for faults and failures. Commentaries such as Raymond Brown's on the Johannine letters (1982) catalogue these and other proposals. Each of them, notice, is an argument about John's thought, not about grammar, and none of them is refuted by the tense of the verb.

So what is the BSB resting on when it says 'refuses to practice sin'? Partly on the aspect of the present, and mostly on the context of the letter. That is a sound basis for a translation. It is a weaker basis for a sermon that says the Greek tense proves the point, because the tense does not prove it. It fits it. The honest way to teach the verse is to show your hearers 1:8, 2:1, 3:4 and 3:8 alongside 3:9, explain that the verbs in 3:9 present sinning as an ongoing activity, and let them see that John is contrasting two ways of life, not two kinds of grammar.

Go back to the verb table you began in the last lesson. Add a new column after Parsing, headed Aspect. For every verb in your passage, write one of three words: perfective for an aorist, imperfective for a present or an imperfect, and for a perfect or pluperfect write stative, with a question mark, to remind yourself that the scholars disagree. For a future, write future and leave it there. You do not have to choose a theory to fill in this column; all the accounts in this lesson would fill it in the same way, apart from the perfect.

Then go through the indicative verbs only, and in the English column, underline the English tense your Bible has used. Look for any place where the English time does not match the Greek tense name: a Greek present translated with an English past, a Greek aorist translated with an English present, and so on. For each one, write a short note saying what in the context tells the translator the time. Is it a story about the past? Is there a time word such as now or then? Is it a general truth? This trains you to see that time comes from the context, which every theory in this lesson accepts.

Finally, choose the one verb in your passage on which you think the most hangs. Write two sentences about it in your notebook. The first begins: The form tells me. The second begins: The context tells me. Keep the two sentences separate. If you find that your second sentence is doing most of the work, you have learned this lesson.