ABSTRACT
The study of Koine Greek tense and aspect is enjoying a renewed interest among biblical scholars. Two recent books simultaneously and independently challenge traditional semantic analyses of the Koine Greek verb and its relation to tense morphology. A subsequent volume exploring current questions in biblical Greek studies devotes half of its essays to the issues Porter and Fanning raise. Fanning's work also introduces Vendler-style lexical aspect into the study of Koine Greek. Although the study of lexical and grammatical aspect has a long history in classical and biblical Greek studies under the label AKTIONSART, Fanning is the first to tie the categories of Greek lexical aspect to the Vendler verb classes familiar in the linguistic and philosophical literature and to describe the interaction between the lexical and grammatical aspect. The chapter demonstrates that the present and aorist forms lack tense, but that the imperfect, pluperfect, perfect and future forms encode past, past, present and future tense, respectively.
