Review of Campbell's Basics of Verbal Aspect

This is a guest post by Dr. Carl Conrad, one of the moderators on B-Greek, and a Greek professor for many years. I was thinking about doing a review, but Dr. Conrad says essentially the same thing I would, only much better and in greater detail, with more learning to add punch to it.

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There has been a great deal of hoopla over the last week surrounding the publication of the new Con Campbell book, Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek: a flurry of reviews (several by students) and a series of blog posts by the author himself, all conveniently listed on the Koinonia site.

I might have felt there was more justification for the hoopla if the book had been titled something like, “Verbal aspect in Biblical Greek: a perspective on the controversy.” But what we are offered appears to be seriously intended as a textbook (with exercises and a key to the exercises) for use in the classroom for intermediate Biblical Greek classes, perhaps supplementing Dan Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. The marketing of such a textbook would seem to imply that the dust has settled on the controversy regarding verbal aspect and that there is now the sort of consensus on the matter making possible what is termed, in the preface of the little book, “an introduction, a textbook, a way in for nonspecialists.”

I really do not believe that the dust has settled on aspect studies sufficiently to say there is much of a scientific or even a more-or-less clear and intelligible doctrine of Greek Verbal Aspect. That is not to say that I don't think some questions regarding verbal aspect have found some resolution and that some pedagogical errors of years gone by (e.g. the "once-for-all-time aorist") have been shown the door. There are some items on which there is general agreement and it is good to have these clearly presented and clarified with the aid of a consistently-applied analogy of how a spectator views a procession as a whole event or as an ongoing process of which only a nearer or more distant perspective is accessible.

My own thinking is that the distinction between Perfective Aspect (Aorist) and Imperfective Aspect (Present, Imperfect) is valid and useful, and I am comfortable with the clarification that "Perfective aspect" means a view of the verbal action or process as a whole and external, while "Imperfective aspect" means a view of the verbal action or process as internal or within the transpiring process. I think that the category termed Aktionsart is indeed useful to characterize particular verbs as "iterative" or "punctiliar" or "progressive"; indeed, I think the category is also useful toward understanding the way voice works in the Greek verb.

Perfect and Pluperfect "tenses" seem to be problematic for a doctrine of verbal aspect: I can see that calling them "Stative" makes sense to some extent, and I can see why some would like to assert that they are really Imperfective. I think, however, that the problem is complicated (1) by the number of instances of οἶδα and ἕστηκα and the pluperfects εἴδειν and εἱστήκειν and their compounds, since they do in fact indicate "knowing" and "standing" as would present and imperfect forms and (2) by the fact that Biblical Greek is a language in flux and that the older perfect and aorist tenses are on their way to merging in the same fashion as they have merged in Latin: the Koine aorist often enough functions like a perfect or a pluperfect tense and there are instances where it would appear that a perfect tense form functions pretty much as does an aorist to indicate completed action. I don't think anything useful is accomplished by attempting to force the perfect-tense forms into the "Imperfective" pigeonhole.

As for the assertion that time is a metaphor and that the best way to understand temporal reference in Greek verbs is in terms of a metaphorical spatial proximity and remoteness, it seems to me an interesting theory, an interesting way of looking at it, but I really believe that ancient Greeks in the Biblical era as well as before and afterwards were thinking pretty much in terms of what we mean by time present, past, and future. What I would like to see explored, however, is some rationale for the fact that present and past counterfactual conditions are conveyed in ancient Greek by the indicative imperfect and aorist tense-forms respectively.

I am still inclined to think that the student learning important Greek verbs would do well to read carefully through the lexical entries for important verbs and note the range of forms in which they most commonly appear as well as the contexts in which their important senses occur. Reading voluminously helps too. The old Latin proverb is discimus agere agendo ("we learn to do by doing") which has corollaries for language-learning: discimus loqui loqendo ("we learn to speak by speaking") and discimus legere legendo ("we learn to read by reading." I think that lots of (Greek) conversation in the classroom -- something apparently unimaginable in the American academic classroom -- and lots of reading Greek in the library will do more for one learning the usage of Greek verbs than doctrines of Greek verbal aspect.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)