Exegetical Fallacies - D. A. Carson

conclusions that are demonstrably wrong. Distinctions in classical Greek may be observed only relatively
more frequently than in Hellenistic Greek; but even so, grammarians who have been trained in the classics
need reorientation to Hellenistic Greek if they are to avoid certain errors when they read the New
Testament.
Fallacies Connected with Various Tenses and Moods
It is not altogether clear that "tense" is a very accurate way of referring to the "Greek tenses." The word
tense calls up notions of time: present tense, future tense, and so forth. But suppose a verb form is
morphologically "present tense" while not in fact referring to present time but to past time: then shall we
refer to such an example as "past present tense"? The possibilities for confusion are boundless. To aid in
the clarity of the following discussion, I shall use "tense" only to refer to morphological form, with rto
implications whatsoever with respect to time.
The majority of contemporary students of Greek grammar argue that Greek tenses are time-related in
the indicative and reflect Aktionsart ("kind of action") outside the indicative. I am not persuaded this is
right. A rising number of Greek grammarians argue that the fundamental semantic force of the Greek tense
is "aspect": it reflects the author's choice of how to present an action. The time of the action is not
conveyed by the Greek tense (which virtually all sides concede is true outside the indicative anyway), nor
the kind of action that took place, but by the author's conception of that action-for example, an author
might think of a particular action as a "complete" action, even if it took a very long time, and choose to
use the aorist tense.2
With these distinctions in mind, it is worth reviewing some recent discussion of particular tenses
(remember: by this I mean "tense forms"). I shall begin with the "standard" categories that are commonly
deployed in Greek grammars, point out the difficulties and fallacies, and move toward an aspectual
approach.
1. The aorist tense
More than two decades ago, Frank Stagg wrote an article about "The Abused Aorist."3 The problem
as he saw it was that competent scholars were deducing from the presence of an aorist verb that the action
in question was "once for all" or "completed." The problem arises in part because the aorist is often
described as the punctiliar tense. Careful grammarians, of course, operating within the traditional
categories, understood and explained that this does not mean the aorist could he used only for point
actions. The aorist, after all, is well-named: it is aorist, without a place, undefined. It simply refers to the
action itself without specifying whether the action is unique, repeated, ingressive, instantaneous, past, or
accomplished. The best grammarians understood this well, and used the term punctiliar much the way a
mathematician uses the term point in geometry-to refer to a location without magnitude. But just as the
mathematical notion is not intuitively obvious, so also has the notion of punctiliar action been a stumbling
block to many interpreters. Stagg provided many examples of grammarians and commentators who insist,
for instance, that the phrase all sinned (rjµ(XpTov [hemarton]) in Romans 5:12 must indicate a once-forall
action, presumably when Adam sinned; that the presentation of the body in Romans 12:1 is a once-forall
commitment; that the repentance noted in Revelation 3:19 must be once-for-all action because the
verbal form is µeTav6rl6ov (nreianoesorz); that the aorist eTUarl (etuthe) in I Corinthians 5:7 ("for
Christ our passover lamb was sacrificed") means that Christ's death is a completed, once-for-all event;