At the same time, I’m sure you’ve also been regularly frustrated by the fact that only issues starting on 1994 are available in digital format and the first issues from 1988-1993 are completely inaccessible unless you have a good reliable university library readily at hand.

I, in particular, have been meaning pick up Stephen Levinsohn and Jenny Heimerdinger article, “The Use of the Definitive Article before Names of People in the Greek Text of Acts with Particular Reference to Codex Bezae” through interlibrary loan. I’ve read it, but having a copy via ILL would be far more useful (note to self). It is an article that—in my view—has set the standard for how we understand the use of the Greek article with proper names, which has only just come up in beginner’s forum over at B-Greek. A read through that article would clear things up nicely. There are a couple books that deal with the subject too: Levinsohn’s Discourse Features of New Testament Greek and Stephanie Bakker’s The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek. Obviously the former is far more affordable for the average person while also covering far more ground than just the use of the article and the function of the noun phrase, but they’re both excellent books (my review of Bakker is here: Noun Phrase Review Part I and Noun Phrase Review Part II). In the mean time, I’m hoping that I can tease out the function of the article with proper names in a more didactic fashion.

Anyway, there is a more accessible venue for Filología Neotestamentaria coming with Logos Bible Software: Filología Neotestamentaria (31 vols.). I’d say that’s definitely worth the money ($99 = $3.20 per issue), particularly for those issues that aren’t available digitally and when you don’t have access to the internet.

Some grammarians not on the list that I plan on adding:

• Smyth
• Kruger
• Mussies
• Gignac
• Mandilaras
• Rijksbaron
• …

Right now, its mostly limited to grammars that I actually own or have easy access to. If anyone would like to suggest grammars that I should write about, I would definitely welcome it–and if anyone would like to provide me with a copy of the grammar in question, then even more so! More than anything, I’d like this to become a helpful resource.

The section on tense begins with the rather odd statement,

“As the pres., imperf., perf.,plusq., and the fut. of the Greek verb, agree in the main with the same tenses in other languages, we shall only elucidate the aor. And the fut. 3. of the pass.”[3]

With such a dismissal of the other forms, one can only hope that students in the 19^th century were not using Winer and Buttmann side by side, since Winer’s grammar was intended to only cover the differences of the New Testament from the rest of the language and Buttmann covers very little of just that. There are only a couple other English grammars that one could use, that of August Matthiä and Friedrich Thiersch, both of which are available in English translation will be discussed in due time.

As for his actual discussion of the aorist, Buttmann makes a number of comparisons with other past tenses. Methodologically, then, he views it as a necessity that a given tense can only be understood in light of the larger system. This also gives us some insight into how he views other forms. The imperfect, perfect and pluperfect are all preterites for him. The imperfect continues in a similar vein as Winer, being used “to state the circumstances, by which the thing, which happened, was attended, when it happened.”[4] This is generally comparable Winer’s secondary/subsidiary conception of the imperfect.

The basic distinction, for Buttmann between the aorist and the perfect also arises from discourse actors: unlike the aorist, the perfect does not narrate. Instead the perfect “connects what has happened, as past, with the present time.”[5] This description is closer to that of Wallace and the tradition he follows than it is to idea of the perfect as stative. But there are a couple key clarifications that follow. Buttmann comments in an accompanying footnote:

“It will always be found that the pure perf., such as it has particularly maintained itself in Greek, is used only when the consequence of the performed action, or even of its ceasing are still connected with the present time. He who says, I have known it, says at the same time, I do not know it any longer. He who says, οἶκον ᾠκοδόμηκα, conveys the idea of the house is being still standing; but if he says, ᾠκοδόμησα, he leaves it at least undecided, and he uses the same expression, when he positively knows that the house is no longer standing.[6]

There are a couple of ambiguities here. First, it is not clear exactly what Buttmann means by the pure perfect and whether it should be distinguished from the perfect of the main text. One explanation might be that pure refers to the use of the perfect historically. If that is the case, then minimally, Buttmann’s words are a grammatical version of the etymological fallacy.

But even if that’s the case, it does not supplant the significance of the description particularly in light of his qualification: in as much as “it has maintained itself in Greek.” To the extent that the language has not changed dramatically, the statement continues to be true. We might then interpret Buttmann’s words as recognizing the existence of language variation and change within the perfect, a change that eventually saw the disappearance of the perfect from the language as its semantics became difficult to distinguish from the aorist.[7] If this reading of Buttmann is accurate, one must wonder if the current fad of seeking unified explanations of grammatical features at the expense of variation and change is somewhat wrong-headed.[8]

Buttmann goes on to note that the aorist can be used for the perfect, an observation which we might parallel with the contemporary linguistic concept of asymmetrical markedness.[9] Specifically, Buttmann has already stated that the aorist (unlike the perfect) leaves undecided (=unmarked) whether a given state or condition continues to exist in the present, while the perfect necessitates that it is (=marked). That the aorist can be used where a perfect can be, is merely evidence of this fact in practice. Buttmann’s observation here might be useful in examining those examples where scholars have claimed that the perfect is merging with the aorist in the Hellenistic Koine or even as early as the Classical period. Do those supposed examples involve perfects expressing a state of affairs that continues to hold to the time of speaking? If so, then, it is unlikely that those are aoristic perfects.

[1] Philipp Buttmann, Greek Grammar, trans. Edward Everett (Boston: Oliver Everett, 1822).

[2] Philipp Buttmann, Greek Grammar, trans. D. Boileau (London: Black, Young & Young, 1833).

[3] Ibid., 350. Buttmann’s Future 3 is the Perfect Future, which is less relevant to our purposes.

[4] Ibid., 350-1.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The specific time of this final change is debated. Evans argues for the Byzantine period (Verbal Syntax, 145-146), while Caragounis holds to a much earlier date (Development of Greek, 154), though he does little more than regurgitate Jannaris (Historical Greek Grammar, 439) without any actual discussion of his own on the matter.

[8] This is perhaps most represented by Porter (Verbal Aspect) and Campbell (Verbal Aspect), whose claims for the Hellenistic period find little foundation in the historical development of the language.

[9] For an accessible Greek-oriented explanation of the concept, see Steve Runge, Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2010), 10-13.

I’ve worked through Fanning, Porter, Campbell, in particular, as well as McKay and a number of linguists who have written on the issues. And in the process, I have come across something that I find incredibly surprising. It may very well be that I simply cannot find them. The best I have seen is either Porter summarizing other scholar’s definitions or his parade analogy. The problem is that the former are consistently summarized and then criticized, which makes it far from clear whether he would use their definitions, whereas the latter seems to excessively informal and less than appropriate for the definitive definitions of the categories in a published, highly technical dissertation.

Am I missing something? Does Porter define the terms perfective, imperfective, and stative and I’ve just missed them? The definitions are clearly and explicitly stated in his intermediate grammar, why should they be so hard to find in his dissertation

If anyone has a suggestion as to where to look, I would be eternally grateful.

Ἀπορῶ…

χρόνοι τρεῖς, ἐνεστώς, παρεληλυθώς, μέλλων. τούτων ὁ παρεληλυθὼς ἔχει διαφορὰς τέσσαρας, παρατατικόν, παρακείμενον, ὑπερσυντέλικον, ἀόριστον· ὧν συγγένεια τρεῖς, ἐνεστῶτος πρὸς παρατατικόν, παρακειμένου πρὸς ὑπερσυντέλικον, ἀορίστου πρὸς μέλλοντα.

There are three tenses: present, past, future. Of these, the past has four sub-types: non-completive, completive, past-completive, and undefined. These stand in three sets: the present with the non-completive, the completive with the past-completive, and the undefined with the future.

Commentary:

It isn’t clear whether or not “present” is a sufficiently accurate translation gloss from ἐνεστώς, a perfect participle, but we have no single English word that fits the bill, I think. LSJ provides some interesting notes on this front. The lexeme is, of course, ἐνίστημι, which is causal in all its non-perfect forms (i.e. present, imperfect, aorist, and future): “to put or place in.” But the perfect is non-causal in its sense (for reasons to be discussed below) and LSJ gives the following (relevant) glosses: “to be upon,” “to be at hand,” “pending,” and “present.” The last two are, perhaps, most important since there LSJ states “especially in [the] perfect participle.” So the question I ask is this: unlike the English word, “present,” which we have continually used to refer to these inflectional forms, does the perfect participle ἐνεστώς express a sense of an ongoing state of affairs in the present that we miss out on in translating it?

Perhaps. It just unfortunate that we cannot ask the author. But he did choose this particular inflectional form of this particular verb to refer to what we today call the “present tense,” an inflectional form that is consistently acknowledged to denote both imperfective aspect and present tense. And if this suggestion for how we understand Thax’s terminology is correct, it makes the correlation between ἐνεστῶτος and παρατατικόν much clearer, the latter, unequivocally meaning incomplete, ongoing, imperfective.

The other two terms, παρεληλυθώς and μέλλων, are less complex in their meaning and I think we can sufficently move on to his other distinctions. I think that of the past tenses, the imperfect is generally self-explanatory: παρατατικός translates perfectly into the Latin based grammatical terms imperfect and imperfective. Ἀόριστος is more difficult. Pefective has become a standard designation for the aorist’s aspectual meaning. The problem is that the term perfective doesn’t entirely match with the term ἀόριστος. Perfective, following its origins in Russian linguistics emphasizes completion, but the ancient grammarians of Greek looked at the aorist form and saw an undeterminative aspect. The question is though, is whether or not these two view can be brought together and if so, should they.

Perfectivity involves the presentation of “a situation as a whole. The span of the perfective includes the initial and final endpoints of the situation: it is closed informationally.” (Smith 1997:66). The first half of this definition might suggest that modern perfectivity is somehow distinct from the undefined nature of  ἀόριστος. Alternatively, the second half of the definition, “closed informationally,” may very well share much in common with ἀόριστος, with its conception that the internal temporal makeup of the situation is inaccessible and thus undefined. If ἀόριστος can be accurately said to be “close informationally,” then it would also implicitly be perfective in the modern sense of including the initial and final endpoints of a given state-of-affairs. On this reading of the term, Dionysius Thrax chose the term ἀόριστος not because it wasn’t perfective, but because the completed nature of the form is not its distinguishing characteristic, since the Perfect also involves completion. The aorist’s nature of closed informationally is more prominent in Greek than its endpoints, since the former quality is precisely what clearly distinguishes it from both the perfect, which only involves a single endpoint, and the present which is not closed informationally and makes no reference to endpoints.

The terminology of the (plu)perfect also necessitates comment. The two terms in question are παρακείμενος and ὑπερσυντέλικος. The former is a paticiple of the verb παράκειμαι,  “to be present and ready for some purpose” (BDAG). But some of LSJ’s glosses are also useful here, denoting a sort of establishment: “to be attached or appended,” “to be laid down,” “to be preserved.” Between the two lexicons, we get the sense that the word involves present time and past establishment (the latter is what drives the translation above). The latter likely motivated Thrax to include the verbal form with the past reference forms, but the former suggests a close correlation with the modern conception of the perfect as stative/resultative: the perfect refers to a current state of affairs that would have arisen from the situation expressed by the present of the same verb (e.g. ἵστημι “to cause to be  in a place or position” –> ἕστηκα ‘I stand’)—though this situation is complicated by a variety of other factors in the period of the New Testament and the picture is not quite so clean.

Regardless it is still quite clear that across the board there are distinct parallels to be drawn between the terminology used in the grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax and contemporary views on tense and aspect.

Works cited:

Bauer, W. et al. 2000. A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature. 3rd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Liddell, H. G., et al. 1996. A Greek-English lexicon. 9th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Carlota. 1997. The Parameter of Aspect. 2nd ed. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Fundamentally different approaches have been taken [in the past century of research on tense and aspect] … so that definitions have been based on (a) formal, (b) cognitive (c) functional or (d) real world categories. A variety of different analyses therefore becomes possible, each with its own justification. Some might want to label as future tense any verb that represents future time, so that the verb in I leave for Montreal on Saturday would then be considered future tense. For similar reasons I have read that book is considered by some to be a paste tense, e.g., Huddleston 1995:102ff, in spite of the fact that the only tense marked in the form is the present or non-past tense of the auxiliary. Here we have a confusion between what is presented (the event taking place in time) and the means of representation (the linguistic category). It is also a confusion between systemic entity and function: if I take a kitchen knife to tighten a screw, must I consequently call it a screwdriver, and refuse to call it a kitchen knife? To rely on function alone, and ignore the morphological and systemic evidence, inevitably leads to a certain amount of error and confusion.

–John Hewson, 1997. Tense and aspect: description and theory, in Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages: theory, typology, diachrony, John Hewson and Vit Bubenik (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 1-2.

If I’m going to take these words seriously, why in the world should I reject the category of tense in Ancient Greek?

The brief length of Winer’s first edition (both in German and English) arises from Winer’s view that New Testament Greek should be treated as merely a subset of Ancient Greek generally.

“A grammar of the New Testament presupposes a general grammar of the Greek language. Consequently the fundamental laws of the Greek language, with the philosophical and historical proof of them, are here omitted. Hence this grammar limits itself, first to the nice and more uncommon grammatical phenomena; particularly to such as are usually regarded as exceptions to the common rules: and secondly to the peculiarities of the New Testament diction, and of the several writers in particular.”[3]

It appears that over time, the value of combining the general rules of Greek with those specifically related to the New Testament was seen viewed as being of high value. And thus each successive edition of Winer was larger than the last. This expansion begins even with the translating into English—though Stuart and Robinson put in significant effort to distinguish their own additions from those of Winer by including smaller type-faced notes in brackets throughout the grammar. These comments sometimes are extensions of statements of Winer, but also are used to voice disagreement on particular issues, which we will see appears a number of times in discussing tense.

The section on tense, as a result of these limits, is rather short, only eight pages. Winer’s discussion of the tenses in relation to each other is representative of this brevity.

“In general, the tenses are used in the same manner as in the Greek writers; vis. the aorist marks simply past time, and is the usual tense of narration; the imperfect and pluperfect are always used in reference to a secondary or subsidiary action or event, which is past, but which stands connected in respect to time with the main action or event; while the perfect expresses past time in connexion with the present.”[4]

From this brief section, we can relate a couple point to contemporary research into tense. First, the general descriptions of the tenses tend to correlate rather well with modern claims about discourse and aspect: the aorist carries the narrative and the imperfect expresses “secondary or subsidiary action[s] or event[s],” which in modern terminology could be stated as Levinsohn does, “[I]n narrative, the imperfect tends to correlate with background information and the aorist with foreground events, because of their inherent nature.”[5] The other point is the relationship between the perfect and the present, which is quite close to the contemporary description of the perfect expressing a past even with ongoing relevance[6] or as a “state or condition resulting from a completed action.”[7]

The rest of Winer’s discussion focuses on specific usages, where it appears that tense are used in the place of others. At this point, it is important to understand statements such as, “The present is sometimes used … for the future”[8] in light of his previous words, “None of these tenses, properly and strictly take, can be substituted for another … but where an exchange of this kind appears to have taken place it is either merely appearance; or else there may generally be discovered … a sufficient reason.”[9] And consistently, what we find in his examples is that this holds true. For example, his discussion of the present being used for the future involves two classes of example citations. The first are those where the propositional content could be expressed in English (and presumably German) with either an English present or an English future. The following texts are representative of this (examples 1-2).

(1) ὁ πιστεύων εἰς τὸν υἱὸν ἔχει ζωὴν αἰώνιον
the one who believes in me has/will have eternal life (John 3:36).

(2) πᾶν οὖν δένδρον μὴ ποιοῦν καρπὸν καλὸν ἐκκόπτεται καὶ εἰς πῦρ βάλλεται
Therefore, every tree that does not produce good fruit is/will be cut down and thrown into the fire (Matt 3:10).

The second category involves a specific Greek construction common to virtually all languages.[10]: In English this is instantiated with an auxiliary, the participle form of go and the infinitive: The weather is going to be dreary on Tuesday. In Greek, we see a parallel phenomenon with the verb ἔρχομαι ‘I come,’ to express future reference.[11] Winer does not provide any examples, but merely refers to this usage of ἔρχομαι. John 4:35 is representative.

(3) οὐχ ὑμεῖς λέγετε ὅτι ἔτι τετράμηνός ἐστιν καὶ ὁ θερισμὸς ἔρχεται;
Do you not say, “Four months more and then comes the harvest”?

The fact that we can make these distinctions within Winer’s descriptions of the tenses is important in light of future developments. A. T. Robertson, in his introduction, fails to recognize this and criticizes Winer accordingly: “It must be said, however, that great as was the service of Winer to this science, he did not at all points carry out consistently his own principles, for he often explained one tense as used for another.”[12] Robertson clearly does not approve of the “stands for” language of Winer, particularly when Winer criticizes others of doing the same. Perhaps Robertson is justified, but at the very least, we must recognize that Winer’s descriptions are motivated within the language and often imply rather important insights into tense semantics.

Consider one more example of just such an insight. In contemporary research, the view that the perfect is in some way stative has been quickly gaining ground for some time.[13] And the traditional view of a past event with present relevance is becoming more and more rare.[14] But is the traditional perspective as traditional as it initially appears? At this point, Winer’s discussion of the present standing for the perfect is of great interest. “Sometimes the present includes in itself the idea of the perfect or imperfect, viz. when the verb is used to express a continued state or condition, uninterrupted duration, etc.”[15] It is difficult to distinguish how Winer conceives of the perfect, but it more likely involves the first phrase, “a continued state or condition” than the second, “uninterrupted duration.” One of his examples is interesting here.

(4) πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι ἐγὼ εἰμί.
Before Abraham was, I am (John 8:58).

Εἰμί and its status as an inherently stative verb is what should guide the analysis of Winer.[16] Equally important is the fact that when Winer moves to uses of the Perfect, we fine him saying, “The perfect sometimes stands for … the present, when an action or state is designated, which commenced in past time, but extends into the present.”[17] At this point, the basis of Robertson’s criticism becomes rather clear. The circularity of stative presents standing for perfects and stative perfects standing for presents is perplexing. But, despite that, we can definitely see that Winer viewed stativity as being a central piece of the nature of the perfect—thus suggesting that the traditional view isn’t quite as traditional is we initially had thought.[18] At this point in history, it appears that while the concepts are already in place, there are plenty descriptive terminological issues needing to be worked out in order to move from the rather convoluted explanation here to something more precise.

[1] Georg B. Winer, Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Sprachidioms (Leipzig: Vogel: 1822).

[2] Georg B. Winer, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament, trans. Moses Stuart and Edward Robinson (Andover, Massachusetts: Codman Press, 1825).

[3] Winer, Greek Grammar, 10.

[4] Ibid., 102. The inconsistent italics of the names of the verb-form are his. The odd thing about this quote is that the translators add their own initialed comment here stating that the precise opposite. They disagree that the tenses are used in the same manner as the “Greek writers.” However, the translators’ disagreement here does not actually challenge anything in the contents of Winer’s claim. That is to paraphrase Winer: the tenses are used in the same manner as the Greek writers “viz. [i.e. as follows”: the aorist is a simple past used for narration just as it is the in the Greek writers, the imperfect and pluperfect are always used for secondary state of affairs in the past, and the perfect is marks past time in connection or relationship with the present.

[5] Stephen H. Levinsohn, Discourse Features of New Testament Greek: A Coursebook on the Information Structure of New Testament Greek, 2nd ed. (Dallas, Tex.: SIL International, 2000), 174.

[6] Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics and Exegetical Syntax of New Testament Greek (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1997), 573.

[7] Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 103.

[8] Winer, Greek Grammar, 104.

[9] Ibid., 102.

[10] Martin Haspelmath, From Space to Time: Temporal Adverbials in the World’s Languages (München: Lincom Europa, 1997), 6.

[11] The relationship between space and time is thoroughly discussed in Haspelmath, cited above, but for discussion of the metaphoric extension from space to time, see Joseph E. Grady, “Metaphor,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 188-213, and the literature cited there.

[12] Robertson, Grammar of the Greek New Testament, 4.

[13] C. M. J Sicking and P. Stork, Two Studies in the Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 168-70; Porter, Verbal Aspect, 256-259; K. L McKay, A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 49-50; Martin Haspelmath, “From Resultative to Perfect in Ancient Greek,” in Nuevos Estudios Sobre Construcciones Resultativos, ed. Leza Iturrioz and Luis José (Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1992), 187-224; Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 103.

[14] Wallace, Greek Grammar, 573.

[15] Winer, Greek Grammar, 104.

[16] See BDAG, loc. cit.

[17] Winer, Greek Grammar, 105. In this category are clauses like John 20:29, “where the origin of present belief is indicated” (Ibid.): ἑώρακάς με πεπίστευκας; (Have you believed because you have seen me?)

[18] It may be useful here to make a distinction between Winer’s intuitive sense of the meaning of the perfect and his ability to describe it. This is an important distinction that plays a key role in the evaluation of the linguistic claims of native speakers, but is also relevant to those who have attained a high level non-native fluency—something that many of the grammar writers of this era likely achieved.

ἐπίσημος, ον (σῆμα, ‘sign’; Trag., Hdt.+).

① of exceptional quality, splendid, prominent, outstanding (Hdt., Trag. et al.; pap, LXX, EpArist, Philo; Joseph.) κριὸς ἐ. ἐκ ποιμνίου a splendid ram fr. the flock MPol 14:1. Of pers. (Diod S 5, 83, 1; Jos., Bell. 6, 201; 3 Macc 6:1; Just., A II, 12, 5) ἐ. ἐν τοῖς ἀποστόλοις outstanding among the apostles Ro 16:7. διδάσκαλος MPol 19:1.

② Also in a bad sense: notorious (Trag. et al.; Plut., Fab. Max. 182 [14, 2]; Jos., Ant. 5, 234) δέσμιος Mt 27:16.—DELG s.v. σῆμα. M-M. TW.

Granted LSJ also includes a number [real] senses from which the sense we have in the NT is derived. In any case. the point is that there is no specifically positive sense and no specifically negative sense. Just one neutral sense.

The variants are*:

The last two are the most common in the majority text. And while for some people that’s enough for a reading to be original, that simply doesn’t work here. The change from the infinitive of the majority text to the subjunctive (particularly a subjunctive without ἵνα) is the most improbable change there could be. The earliest witness we have are all from the 4th century and they all vary in what they provide as a text. According to the data put forward by Markopoulos, the farther we get from the Hellenistic period, them more likely that the bare subjunctive will be replaced by some other construction. He provides this useful chart for how the distribution of different construction patterns change from the Hellenistic period to the Early Medieval period, which I include below with his own commentary on it (Markopoulos 105; the statement “Table 4.7” is a typo. It should read “Table 4.2”):

Now, with this in mind, recall R. T. France’s comments on this textual issue:

“The syntactically impossible reading of א B, τί θέλετέ με ποιήσω, must result from a conflation of the two constructions. The reading which best explains the variants is τί θέλετε ποιήσω (with ἵνα understood), the abruptness of which led to correcting the subjunctive to an infinitive, with the consequent addition of με” (R. T. France 2002).

France’s proposal essentially necessitates the following path of development:

τί θέλετέ ποιήσω ὑμῖν; (C f¹ f¹³ Θ 205 565)

–> τί θέλετέ ποιῆσαί ὑμῖν; (W* Δ)

–> τί θέλετέ με ποιῆσαί ὑμῖν; (א^c2 L W^c 579 892 2427)

–> τί θέλετέ με ποιήσω ὑμῖν; (א^c B Ψ arm)

This line of textual development necessitates that France is correct about the construction being “abrupt.” But the data suggests that it probably isn’t. More likely this is a perfectly normal construction that is substantially more common in the everyday speech of Greek speakers that has on various occasions through the history of the language slipped into the literary language—notably only in speeches and dialogue. From there, France (Holmes, among others) would have us believe that the second corrector of Sinaiticus (6th-7th c.) had a superior text to the original corrector (4th c.)while that same original corrector agrees perfectly perfectly with Vaticanus. It seems to me that this line of reasoning takes the impossibility of the reading as its starting point. But we already know now that it isn’t impossible. It is, in fact, quite natural.

We also know from Markopoulos’ table above that the V + Vsubjunctive construction begins to die in Early Medieval Greek—around the same time that Sinaiticus’ second group of correctors work to bring the text in line with the Byzantine tradition. At that point in time, the infinitive reading had already been introduced (as evidenced by Alexandrinus) and it’s consistently looking more and more appealing to those scribes. On top of that, the more rare this construction gets, the less acceptable to scribes the additional με appears. In response, some scribes change the subjunctive to an infinitive and other scribes just drop out the pronoun.

On this account, accepting the reading of the NA27 allows for deriving most of the variants directly rather than relying of an incredibly complex line of derivation as the one that France proposes. At least, that’s how I see it, but I’m not a text critic. I’m a linguist who dabbles in it from time to time. I would be curious about anyone else’s thoughts on this proposed reconstruction.

* א* lacks the entire line as a result of homoioteleuton from the θέλομεν of v. 25 35 through ἵνα of v.37. The variants and the manuscripts listed are taken from the apparatuses of Tischendorf and the UBS4.

τί θέλετέ [με] ποιήσω ὑμῖν;

The variation in the textual history of the clause is rather severe. The two main alternatives are:

τί θέλετε ποιήσω ὑμῖν;

τί θέλετέ με ποιησαι ὑμῖν;

Some describe the NA27’s choice as being grammatically impossible, a conflation of the other two main possibilities. For example, R. T. France states (2002), “The syntactically impossible reading of א B, τί θέλετέ με ποιήσω, must result from a conflation of the two constructions. The reading which best explains the variants is τί θέλετε ποιήσω (with ἵνα understood), the abruptness of which led to correcting the subjunctive to an infinitive, with the consequent addition of με.”

That the NA27 text is ungrammatical is generally agreed upon. It’s just not possible.

By chance, however, I spent part of my summer reading through Theodore Markopoulos’ The Future in Greek: From Ancient to Medieval (2009), a volume that focuses on the periphrastic constructions (e.g. μέλλω+inf, for example) that would eventually muscle out the synthetic future during the Byzantine and Medieval period. θέλω constructions play a prominent part in every chapter of the book, and his discussion of various formations that appear with the verb: V + INF, V + ἵνα + SUBJ, V + V_subj. There’s a lot of interesting data that Markopoulos provides that’s worth looking with reference to this supposedly “impossible” constructions.

Because I hold that understanding Greek in historical context is an absolute necessity for understanding the language in the 1st century, I think it is worthwhile to look at Markopoulos’ analysis of this construction in the Classical period, the Hellenistic-Roman period and also in the Medieval period.

Θέλω+V_subj in Classical Greek

Now no one questions the acceptability of the plain old θέλω+V_subj. Its grammatical status is not in question. But it is worth commenting on its development in the Classical period. Markopoulos (2009: 38-39) notes the following facts about the construction:

1. At least two other modal-like verbs are used in the same way: βούλομαι ‘want’ and κελεύω ‘urge.’
2. The construction is only used in dialogue and likely were a feature of the spoken language more so than the written.
3. All known examples from the Classical period involves questions.
4. Goodwin (1875) suggests that the construction originated as two paratactic sentences that, by the time of Ancient Greek, likely involved some kind of subordinate relationship. Whether this is an accurate origin cannot be determined because there are no examples in Homer.
5. There is however, a parallel from Early Latin with the V +  V_subj pattern.

There’s not much conclusive here. And at this point is time there is no instances of a shared argument between the two clauses like we seen in the NA27’s text of Mark 10:36 (τί θέλετέ [με] ποιήσω). With that said, Goodwin’s proposal about the origin of the construction parallels that of both Moulton and Howard (1929) and Robertson (1923) who suggest that the construction is *still* paratactic. That interpretation results in treating this as two questions: “What do you want of me? What should I do?” But if, according to Markopoulos, there was already a sense of subordination in the Classical period, then it is not likely that the language would have degrammaticalized away from subordination a few hundred years later.

Θέλω+V_subj in Hellensitic-Roman Greek

This is definitely where the construction becomes more interesting. Unfortunately, Markopoulos does not provide a particularly large number of examples. And, equally frustrating, he does not provide any direct parallels to our clause—though he does state that they do exist. With that said, provides the following two charts of statistical data (74; 76).

Table 3.11 Volitional (ἐ)θέλω in the H-R period (papyri)

Table 3.12 Volitional (ἐ)θέλω in the H-R period (papyri)

Now, numbers aren’t particularly useful out of context, but I’ll do the best I can to create a bit of context for us. The disjunctive/co-reference parentheses refer to the subject of the subordinate clause being either the same as or different to that of the matrix clause. And it’s the disjunctive data that we’re primarily interested in here since that’s what we’re dealing with in Mark 10:36. And with that, its somewhat disappointing to see that Markopoulos does not provide numbers for disjunctive subjunctive complement clauses in the non-papyri texts. He doesn’t explicitly list his corpus anywhere, so I don’t know if he simply did not have any examples available or what. I do know that he used at least part of the NT because he lists Matthew 26:15 as one of his infinitive complement examples. So who knows there what he was thinking. If there are no other examples in non-papyri texts, then at the very least, it is clear that Mark has much more in common with the every day language of the people than with the literary writers—but we already knew that.

Some More Data

What’s equally disappointing is that Markopoulos provides no examples of disjunctive subjunctive complements, so we do know know if there are other examples where we have the enclitic object pronouns appearing between the matrix verb and the complement verb. So we’re pretty much back where we were before in terms of whether or not, the appearance of the με between the two verbs is an acceptable construction or not. I’ve been digging through examples from the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, as well as other contemporary and literary Hellenistic Greek texts for other θέλω+Vs and could only find a few examples of pronouns appearing between the two verbs and in all cases case it was a dative pronoun. Here’s one example from Epictetus:

τί ἔτι ἀγωνιᾷς, μὴ οὐ δείξῃς ἡμῖν, τίς εἶ; θέλεις σοι εἴπω, τίνα ἡμῖν ἔδειξας;
Epictetus, Dissertationes ab Arriano Digestae 3.2.14

There are a few more, but they’re not particularly different.* But even though there isn’t the same issue of the accusative clitic =με that suggests the subjunctive of Mark 10:36 should rather be an infinitive, this is still a clear instance of the object of the subjunctive verb being pulled forward to the matrix verb. So there’s nothing, in principle, wrong with a pronoun appearing there.

The question before us then is this: if its perfectly acceptable to have the pronominal object of the subordinate clause between the two verbs, why is it then not acceptable to the the pronominal object of the main clause between the two verbs? And if Markopoulos is correct and that the V+Vs pattern goes beyond θέλω to other modal-like verbs, then what we have is a relatively rare, but consistent alternative construction to the standard infinitive and ἵνα+subjunctive constructions.

With that in mind, I’ve done some searching for the pattern with the two other verbs that Markopoulos mentions: βούλομαι ‘want’ and κελεύω ‘urge.’ We get some very nice examples:

βούλει φῶμεν, ὦ Κρίτων, ᾗ ἄλλους ἀγαθοὺς ποιήσομεν;
Plato, Euthydemus 292d

τί γὰρ βούλεσθʼ εἴπω;
Demonsthenes, Adversus Androtionem 70

ἀλλʼ ὅ τι βούλεσθʼ ἐξετάσωμεν.
Demosthenes, On Organization 28

βούλεσθε εἴπω καὶ συνεξέλωμεν;
Aelius Aristides, Orationes 34

You may have noticed that every single one of these examples appears in dialogue—just as we saw above Markopoulos noted. And what’s more, they continue to only be. I haven’t tried to search for examples with intervening pronouns. With literally millions of words of text, sifting through false hits becomes quickly becomes overwhelming as the complexity of the searches go up.

A Proposal

In terms of significance, I’d say that we cannot simply disregard the pattern, even though it definitely doesn’t translate directly/naturally into English without add an English infinitive (to+bare verb). Contrary to what France stated above, we cannot simply chalk up the NA27 text to someone viewing the V+Vs structure as ungrammatical and then changing the subjunctive to an infinitive and then someone else adding the με and then someone else correcting it back to the subjunctive. When you combine that with the fact that there’s no evidence that the ἵνα is “understood,” France isn’t really left with a leg to stand on. The V+Vs construction has a long and impressive pedigree, in spite of its rarity.

And in terms how we explain the construction, there’s a possibility that takes Moulton, Robertson, and Goodwin’s observations about paratactic origins seriously (i.e. deriving from the interrogative subjunctive), but recognizes that there is still some level of subordination in the construction. This type of complex clause is called Co-Subordination. I know, it’s not a great name. The idea is that it provides a way for conceptualizing constructions that aren’t quite subordination and aren’t quite coordination. This has been a real problem for a number of minority languages around the world, where complex sentences are more difficult to analyze in terms of the traditional terminology and since then, the concept of co-subordination has been extended to see how it works (with much success) for the more well-studied languages.

I’ve created a tree diagram below that I hope demonstrates the relationship. The formalism is Role and Reference Grammar (there’s a brief overview of RRG here). I’ve tried to label and explain anything that might possibly need explanation.

Now, its entirely clear to me whether or not the first tree or the second tree is more accurate. The difference would be determined on the basis of whether any clause level modifiers could appear between τί θέλετέ [με] and ποιήσω ὑμῖν;. And without more data, there’s really no way of knowing. Since the construction is primarily limited to dialogue, its not as common as it could be in the surviving texts, but all of the examples of the construction I’ve thus see would suggest the second representation is the correct one and that clause level modifiers aren’t permitted between the two pieces of the construction.

Now then, this post has gone on for quite a while now and I’m really curious about any feedback about this proposal.

*There are also some great false hits like this one: εἴ τι δέ ποτε θέλεις, σοὶ πέμψω (DDBDP PSI Document 825: IV/Vspc? [LINK])—don’t let it trick you.

Works cited:

France, R. T. 2002. The Gospel of Mark. NIGTC. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.

Goodwin, William Watson. 1875. Syntax of the moods and tenses of the Greek verb. Boston: Ginn and Co.

Markopoulos, Theodore. 2009. The futoure in Greek: From Ancient to Medieval. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moulton, J. H. and Wilbert Howard. 1928. Grammar of New Testament Greek: Accidence and word formation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

Robertson, A. T. 1923. A grammar of the Greek New Testament in light of historical research. London: Hodder & Stoughton.