The Perfect

Count the verbs in the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT), as tagged by the free MorphGNT project, and the proportions are striking. The aorist and the present each occur more than eleven thousand times across all the moods. The imperfect and the future each occur about sixteen or seventeen hundred times. The perfect occurs nearly sixteen hundred times, roughly half of them in the indicative, and the pluperfect fewer than a hundred. So the perfect is a minority form, used where a writer wants something the aorist and present do not give him. That is one reason Porter called it the most heavily marked of the forms, and why, on any theory, a perfect in your passage is worth stopping for.

The perfect is easy to recognise once you know its sign, which is reduplication: the first consonant of the stem is doubled with an ε (e) at the front. πιστεύω (pisteuō, I believe) becomes πεπίστευκα (pepisteuka, I have believed), with πε- in front. γράφω (graphō, I write) becomes γέγραφα (gegrapha, I have written). τελέω (teleō, I finish) becomes τετέλεκα (teteleka, I have finished). In the active, there is often a κ (k) before the ending, as in πεπίστευκα and τετέλεκα. In the middle and passive there is no κ, and the endings are joined straight to the stem: τετέλεσται (tetelestai, it has been finished), γέγραπται (gegraptai, it has been written). Verbs that begin with a vowel lengthen it instead of reduplicating, as with the augment.

Here is the perfect active indicative of πιστεύω for reference: πεπίστευκα (pepisteuka), I have believed; πεπίστευκας (pepisteukas), you have believed; πεπίστευκε or πεπίστευκεν (pepisteuke, pepisteuken), he has believed; πεπιστεύκαμεν (pepisteukamen), we have believed; πεπιστεύκατε (pepisteukate), you have believed; πεπιστεύκασι or πεπιστεύκασιν (pepisteukasi, pepisteukasin), they have believed. You met πεπίστευκεν in John 3:18 in lesson 1. The pluperfect adds the augment as well, and is used where a writer looks back from a point in the past: ᾔδειν (ēdein, I knew) in John 1:33, from οἶδα, is a pluperfect.

Perfects also turn up as participles, and these are some of the most theologically weighty forms in the New Testament. γεγεννημένος (gegennēmenos, having been born) in 1 John 3:9, which you read in lesson 2, is a perfect passive participle. So is σεσῳσμένοι (sesōsmenoi, having been saved) in Ephesians 2:8, which section 4 reads. The tool will call them perfect passive participles and give you their case, number and gender. Learn to stop when you see one.

What does the perfect mean? Here the three modern accounts you met in lesson 2 divide more sharply than anywhere else, and the older view is still very much alive. Each deserves to be heard at its strongest.

The older view, which most preachers learned and which Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (1996) still teaches in a refined form, is that the perfect describes a completed action with continuing results. In the indicative, it speaks of something done in the past whose effect remains in the present. Matthew 4:4 is a model case: Jesus answers the tempter with γέγραπται (gegraptai, it has been written), perfect passive indicative, third person singular, of γράφω. The writing happened long ago, and it stands written now, which is exactly why it is authoritative. The strength of this view is that it fits a great many perfects in the New Testament very naturally, and that it captures what translators are trying to do when they use the English perfect with has or have.

Fanning's account, described in lesson 2, refines the older view rather than replacing it. He treats the perfect as a combination of three things: a state, an action prior to that state, and a summary way of viewing it. The emphasis falls on the state, but the prior action is part of the meaning. In practice Fanning and the older grammars read most perfects the same way, and his work adds a careful account of why perfects of different kinds of verbs behave differently.

Porter's account is that the perfect expresses a third aspect of its own, stative aspect: it presents a state of affairs, without necessarily saying anything about an action that produced it. His strongest evidence is the perfects that have no past action in them at all. οἶδα (oida, I know) is perfect in form and present in meaning, and no one thinks it means I came to know in the past and the result continues. ἕστηκα (hestēka, I stand) is the same. Those are not rare words; οἶδα is one of the commonest verbs in the New Testament. On Porter's view, the state is the meaning of the form, and whether there was a prior action is something the verb and the context tell you, just as the kind of action does for the aorist.

Campbell's account is the boldest: the perfect is imperfective in aspect, like the present, but with heightened proximity, an especially vivid or intense presentation of the action. He points to perfects of verbs of speaking and crying out, which in narrative often function like vivid presents. John 1:15 is an example of the kind of verse such arguments rest on: John μαρτυρεῖ (martyrei, testifies) and κέκραγεν (kekragen, has cried out), a present and a perfect side by side, which the BSB renders 'testified' and 'cried out'. The perfect there does not obviously describe a completed act with a lasting result; it reads very much like a strong present. Campbell's view of the perfect has drawn more criticism than any other part of his work, and Porter and Fanning both reject it. But it is a serious attempt to explain verses that the older view handles awkwardly.

What do the accounts agree on, for a preacher's purposes? That the perfect, unlike the aorist, involves a state, or at least presents the action as bearing on the present situation; that the English has or have is often, but not always, a good translation; and that whether a particular perfect describes a past act with lasting results depends on the verb and the context. When you meet a perfect, the safe thing to say is that the writer is presenting the situation as standing: it is written, I know, it is finished. Whether you add 'because of something done in the past' depends on the verb, and with most verbs of doing, such as writing or finishing, the answer is yes.

Now the anchor. The SBLGNT gives Jesus' word as one Greek word: Τετέλεσται (tetelestai, it is finished, or it has been finished). It is the perfect passive indicative, third person singular, of τελέω (teleō, I finish, bring to an end, carry out). Take it apart as lesson 1 taught you: τε- is the reduplication, τελε- is the stem, the σ belongs to the way this verb forms its perfect passive, and -ται is the ending, third person singular, middle or passive. The context makes it passive: something has been finished. The subject is not named, and that silence is part of the word's force.

This is a verb of doing, so on every account of the perfect it presents a state that results from an action: the work has been brought to its end, and it stands complete. The older view and Fanning would say exactly that. Porter would say the word presents the state of completion, and that the context, the long story of the work the Father gave, supplies the act that completed it. Campbell would hear in it a vivid, emphatic presentation. None of these accounts disagrees about what Jesus is saying. They disagree about which part of it comes from the form.

What is finished? John has been preparing the answer for chapters, and the inquiry questions took you to the verses. In 4:34 Jesus says his food is to do the will of the one who sent him 'and to finish His work', with τελειώσω (teleiōsō, I may finish), from τελειόω (teleioō, I complete, bring to its goal), a near relative of τελέω. In 13:1, as the passion begins, he loved his own εἰς τέλος (eis telos), which the BSB renders 'to the very end'. In 17:4 he says to the Father 'I have glorified You on earth by accomplishing the work You gave Me to do', with τελειώσας (teleiōsas, having accomplished). Then in 19:28 the narrator uses the very word Jesus will speak: knowing that everything τετέλεσται, and so that the Scripture might be fulfilled, τελειωθῇ (teleiōthē, it might be completed), Jesus says I am thirsty. The BSB renders the narrator's τετέλεσται 'had now been accomplished', because English shifts tenses back when reporting what someone knew, while Greek keeps the tense of the original thought. Two verses later Jesus says the same word aloud. In John's telling, the cry from the cross is the announcement that the Father's work, and the scripture that foretold it, has been brought to its goal.

Then there is the claim, heard in many pulpits, that tetelestai was the word written on receipts and meant 'paid in full'. Here is what can be said with confidence. τελέω really is used for paying what is owed, in the New Testament itself: Romans 13:6, 'This is also why you pay taxes', has τελεῖτε (teleite, you pay), and Matthew 17:24, 'Does your Teacher pay the two drachmas?', has τελεῖ (telei, he pays). The great reference work on the vocabulary of the papyri, James Hope Moulton and George Milligan's Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, documents the verb's use for paying taxes and dues in everyday documents of the period, and it is also where the receipt claim began: it reported that tax receipts were often introduced by the word, usually abbreviated. The abbreviation is the problem. In a 2022 study of some three hundred tariff receipts from Egypt, Gary Manning of Talbot School of Theology pointed out that where a clerk wrote the word out in full, it is τετελώνηται (tetelōnētai, the tax has been paid), from a different verb, and that papyrus editors have read the abbreviation that way since the 1930s. So the popular form of the claim, that receipts were headed with τετέλεσται and that a first-century hearer would have heard the cry as a commercial term, is not supported by the evidence usually offered for it. It is repeated far more often than it is documented, and before you repeat it you should see the evidence for yourself.

So how should a preacher handle it? The payment idea is not foreign to the New Testament's account of the cross. Mark 10:45 speaks of the Son of Man giving his life as a ransom, and the language of price and purchase runs through the letters. A preacher may say that τελέω could be used of paying a debt, and that the image fits what the New Testament elsewhere says about the cross. He should not say that tetelestai means paid in full, or that John's readers would have heard it that way, because the evidence in John points somewhere else: to a work given by the Father and now finished, and to scripture fulfilled. Preach what John says first. The echo, if it is one, comes second.

One more thing should be said plainly, because it is where this verse meets a real division in the church. Protestant interpreters have long read 'It is finished', together with Hebrews 10:10-14 and its ἐφάπαξ, as excluding any ongoing sacrificial offering of Christ: the sacrifice is complete, and Hebrews 10:18 says 'an offering for sin is no longer needed'. Roman Catholic teaching, set out at the Council of Trent in its twenty-second session (1562), agrees that the sacrifice of the cross was offered once and is complete, and holds that the Mass is not a new or additional sacrifice but the one sacrifice of the cross made present, the same victim offered in an unbloody manner, and that it is truly propitiatory; Orthodox teaching on the Eucharist holds a related view. Both sides affirm that the work was finished. They differ on what that finished work means for the church's worship. The perfect tense of τετέλεσται cannot settle that question, and neither side needs to pretend that it does.

Ephesians 2:8 begins τῇ γὰρ χάριτί ἐστε σεσῳσμένοι διὰ πίστεως (tē gar chariti este sesōsmenoi dia pisteōs, for by grace you have been saved through faith). The verb is in two parts. ἐστε (este, you are) is the present indicative, second person plural, of εἰμί (eimi, I am). σεσῳσμένοι (sesōsmenoi, having been saved) is the perfect passive participle, nominative plural masculine, of σῴζω (sōzō, I save). Together they make what the grammars call a periphrastic perfect, a perfect expressed by a form of to be plus a perfect participle. Paul has already used exactly the same expression three verses earlier, in 2:5. It means much the same as a simple perfect, and it presents salvation as a state in which the readers now stand, resulting from what God has done.

That is a strong statement, and it should be preached with all its strength. The readers are not told that they are on their way to being saved, or that they may be saved if they keep going. They are told that they have been saved, by grace, and that this is their present standing. The anxious believer needs to hear the perfect: something has been done, and it stands.

But read Ephesians 2:8 alongside the rest of the New Testament, as the inquiry asked you to do. Romans 8:24 says ἐσώθημεν (esōthēmen, we were saved), an aorist. 1 Corinthians 1:18 speaks of τοῖς σῳζομένοις (tois sōzomenois, those being saved), a present passive participle, which the BSB renders 'us who are being saved'. Romans 5:9 says σωθησόμεθα (sōthēsometha, we shall be saved), a future. The New Testament speaks of salvation in every tense: an event in the past, a present state, an ongoing process and a future completion. Ephesians 2:8 is one of these statements, and the boldest about the present state. It is not the whole doctrine, and no single verb form is.

The verse also sits on two live debates, and you should know where they are so that you do not settle them by grammar. The first is about perseverance. Reformed interpreters read the perfect of 2:8 as the present form of a salvation God will certainly complete, and point to verses such as Philippians 1:6. Wesleyan and other Arminian interpreters agree that the perfect describes a real present state, and reply that the New Testament also warns those in that state, in passages such as Hebrews 6:4-6 and Colossians 1:23, 'if indeed you continue in your faith', and that the warnings presuppose a real possibility of falling away. Both read the same perfect. The perfect describes a state that now stands; it does not, by itself, say whether that state can be lost, and both traditions have to argue the question from other texts.

The second debate is about Ephesians itself. Paul's undisputed letters usually put being saved in the future or in progress, use the past more sparingly, and never use the perfect of σῴζω, which in the New Testament letters appears only in Ephesians 2:5 and 2:8. Scholars who think Ephesians was written by a follower of Paul after his death often point to these perfects as a sign of a later, more fully realised view of salvation. Scholars who hold that Paul wrote it reply that Romans 8:24 already uses a past tense, that the letter's emphasis fits its purpose, and that the perfect in 2:5 and 2:8 sits beside the future hope of 1:14 and 4:30. The New Testament Survey track discusses authorship. Here it is enough to say that the perfect is part of the evidence in that discussion, and that it can be read on either view.

English has a form that often matches the Greek perfect, the perfect with has or have, and translators use it wherever they can. But English has rules of its own, and they sometimes force a different choice. 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 is the clearest case. Paul passed on that Christ ἀπέθανεν (apethanen, he died), an aorist, that he ἐτάφη (etaphē, he was buried), an aorist, and that he ἐγήγερται (egēgertai, he has been raised), a perfect passive indicative, third person singular, of ἐγείρω (egeirō, I raise). Paul has changed form deliberately: the death and burial are presented as events, the resurrection as a standing fact. Christ was raised, and he remains raised. That is one of the most important perfects in the New Testament.

Yet the BSB renders 15:4 'He was raised on the third day', with an English past, and in 15:12 and 15:14, where Paul uses exactly the same form ἐγήγερται, it renders 'has been raised'. Why? Because in 15:4 the verb has a time phrase, on the third day, and English does not allow the perfect with a specific past time: we say I arrived yesterday, not I have arrived yesterday. The translators had to choose between keeping the time phrase natural and keeping the perfect, and in 15:4 they kept the time phrase. In 15:12 and 15:14 there is no time phrase, so the English perfect returns. This is not a translation error. It is a place where the Greek says something English cannot easily say in one sentence, and a preacher who knows the Greek can say it for his hearers: Christ was raised on the third day, and he stands raised now.

Your tools will also show you a smaller trap. Galatians 2:20 in the BSB begins 'I have been crucified with Christ', and that is a perfect, συνεσταύρωμαι (synestaurōmai, I have been crucified with), perfect passive indicative, first person singular, of συσταυρόω (systauroō, I crucify with). But in the SBLGNT and most printed Greek texts that word ends verse 19, not verse 20. If you open Galatians 2:20 in a Greek tool and cannot find it, look one verse back. Verse divisions are later additions, and editions do not always place them in the same spot.

How then should you speak of a perfect from the pulpit? Say what it presents: a situation that stands. With verbs of doing, it is usually right to add that the standing situation is the result of something done: it is written, and so it stands; it is finished, and so it stands complete; you have been saved, and so you stand in grace. Avoid saying that the perfect tense means that something can never be undone, or that it proves the doctrine of your tradition; it presents a present state and does not on its own say how long the state will last. And when you find a perfect in a list of aorists, as in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, or in a cluster, as in 2 Timothy 4:7, where Paul writes ἠγώνισμαι (ēgōnismai, I have fought), τετέλεκα (teteleka, I have finished) and τετήρηκα (tetērēka, I have kept), stop and ask why the writer wanted his readers to see the situation as standing. Notice that τετέλεκα, I have finished the race, is the same verb as τετέλεσται. Paul at the end of his life uses the word Jesus used on the cross.

Return to your verb table for the last time in this module. Find every perfect and pluperfect in your passage, including participles, and mark each with a star. In the What the context adds column, write what situation the perfect presents as standing, and whether the verb is a verb of doing, such as writing or finishing, where a prior act is implied, or a verb like οἶδα, where it is not. If your passage has no perfects, find the nearest perfect in the surrounding chapter and use that.

Now look back over the whole table. You have a column for parsing, one for aspect, one for what the context adds, and marks on the aorists and the perfects. On a new page headed Verb map, write one short paragraph, five or six sentences, describing how the verbs carry your passage: where the main line of action is, where the background is, where the commands are and what aspect they use, and where a perfect presents something as standing. Write it in plain English that a member of your church could follow. Do not use the words aorist or perfect in it.

Then write one more sentence at the bottom of the page, beginning: The verb I most want to explain when I teach this passage is. Name the verb, and say in a few words what you would say about it, using only what the form and the context together can support. Keep this page. It is the first finished piece of your capstone study, and in Module 5 you will add voice and mood to it.