The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming Greek grammar textbook. I am sharing it now because of its relevance to my review of “Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek” by Constantine Campbell.
Earlier on, we suggested that the example of Mark 1:11 is not an argument against the aorist being a true past tense because it is a performative. Performatives are unique in that the event in the real world happens by virtue of the verbal description being uttered. In this section, we expand on this argument and defend it in detail. I show how a proper understanding of tense and aspect along with the verb in question leads to the correct interpretation, and this interpretation does not contradict the description of the aorist we gave.
First, it may be helpful to lay out the prevailing view of Mark 1:11. All major modern English translations (at least all those found on BibleHub) use a lexical item that refers to pleasure of some kind to translate εὐδόκησα:
- … ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα
a. ‘…with/in you/thee/whom I am well pleased’ (ESV, NIV, BSB, BLB, KJV, NKJV, NASB, LSB, AmpB, CSB, ASV, D-RB, ERV, MSB, NAB, NRSV, NHEB, WBT, WEB)
b. ‘…you bring me great joy.’ (NLT)
c. ‘…I take delight in you/in you I take great delight.’ (HCSB/NET)
d. ‘…I am pleased with you.’ (CEV, GWT, GNT, ISV)
e. ‘…in whom I delighted.’ (LSV, YLT)
f. ‘…in thee is my delight.’ (WNT)
We challenge this consensus about the meaning of εὐδοκέω and suggest that it is better understood as closer to the English word ‘approve.’ As we will see, this has significant consequences for our understanding of the verse and the use of the aorist. Every translation in takes εὐδοκέω to refer to a present state. Not only would this be a problem for the past tense understanding of the aorist, but it would also be a problem for the perfective meaning, which normally refers to a temporal boundary. There is no temporal boundary in a state that simply holds, and indeed, some states such as εἰμί disallow the aorist entirely. The English word approve, on the other hand, would not clash with the aorist in any way, since it is not a state and also has a natural endpoint, i.e. is a telic verb. Even though the predicates am well pleased and approve might be similar in meaning, they differ significantly in their grammatically-significant components of meaning. To put it a differently, they have different aktionsart values, the former being a state, and the latter an achievement.
The rest of this exegetical section is organized as follows. First, we analyze the meaning of the verb εὐδοκέω. Second, we discuss what a performative is and how they are used across languages, including what kinds of verb forms languages employ. Third, we look at the passages in question and show that the aorist is best understood as a performative and the clause in question should be translated ‘I approve you.’
The verb εὐδοκέω
Part of determining the best English equivalent of εὐδοκέω is carefully distinguishing between the available options. The states delight and be well pleased entail that the subject has a positive state of mind or emotion about something. Our first question is whether there are contexts where εὐδοκέω cannot refer to a positive emotion. If this can be shown, then the verb itself does not contribute a positive emotion like delight/be well pleased. Indeed, there are examples where εὐδοκέω takes an argument which would clearly elicit a negative emotion and in which the subject is not delighting.
- τότε ἐντραπήσεται ἡ καρδία αὐτῶν ἡ ἀπερίτμητος, καὶ τότε εὐδοκήσουσιν τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν. (Lev 26:41)
‘then their uncircumcised hearts will be put to shame, and then they will accept their sins.’
- καὶ πολλοὶ ἀπὸ Ισραηλ εὐδόκησαν τῇ λατρείᾳ αὐτοῦ. (1 Macc 1:43)
‘and many from Israel consented serving him.’
- Διὸ μηκέτι στέγοντες εὐδοκήσαμεν καταλειφθῆναι ἐν Ἀθήναις μόνοι (1 Thes 3:1)
‘Therefore no longer being able to bear it, we accepted being left in Athens alone.’
In all of these examples, the subject of the verb εὐδοκέω does not show positive emotion towards the argument of the verb. Leviticus 26:41 describes the people repenting, and when they εὐδοκήσουσιν their sins, they accept their guilt, but they are certainly not delighting or being well-pleased in them. In fact, the context would demand the exact opposite interpretation. The people mourn over their sin. This example alone shows that εὐδοκέω is fundamentally different from a verb like delight, which would be impossible in this context. The context in 1 Macc 1:43 is similar in that the people who ‘approve’ serving the king are not delighting in his service but are doing so reluctantly. Finally, 1 Thes 3:1 explicitly says that Paul was feeling a negative emotion, but despite this, he still ‘accepted’ being left in Athens alone. It would be a contradiction to translate this as ‘delight.’
In other examples, neither a positive emotion nor a negative emotion is present, but something is agreed to or accepted. Sometimes this occurs where two options are presented before someone.
- καὶ εὐδόκησαν οὕτως. (Tob 5:17)
‘And they agreed thus.’
- καὶ εὐδόκησαν ἐν Ἀλεξάνδρῳ, ὅτι αὐτὸς ἐγένετο αὐτοῖς ἀρχηγὸς λόγων εἰρηνικῶν (1 Macc 10:47)
‘And they approved Alexander, because he had become a leader to them of peaceful words.’
In Tob 5:17, Tobit is speaking to Azariah, and he proposes a deal to him, namely to pay him a certain wage. After Tobit finishes his proposal, we have our clause. Again, there is not necessarily delighting in the agreement. Both parties simply accept the terms (referred to by οὕτως ‘thus’). In 1 Macc 10:47, Jonathan and the people just finished hearing the letter of King Demetrius read to them, and 1 Macc 10:46 states that they did not believe or accept them. Contrary to how they responded to King Demetrius’s proposal to them, it says of the Judeans that they ‘approved’ Alexander. This does not necessarily mean they had positive emotions about him, though it does not contradict that. It simply means that they approved Alexander as a leader rather than Demetrius.
All these examples suggest that εὐδοκέω need not refer to a positive emotion like the predicates delight and be well pleased. Where, then, is the translation coming from? There are three issues here. First, I suppose that the biggest reason for the translation ‘be well pleased’ is the desire to be morpho-syntactically transparent between English and Greek. What do we mean by this? The verb εὐδοκέω is made up of the adverb εὐ ‘well’ and the verb δοκέω ‘seem.’ In the long line of “literal” English translations, there has been a general desire to match one morpheme in English to another morpheme in Greek. If εὐ means ‘well,’ then the verb εὐδοκέω must be translated with ‘well’ in it. As we have seen with compound verbs in general (##), this does not work. In addition to the parallelism between εὐ and ‘well,’ the argument ἐν σοί ‘in you’ can also conveniently be translated “literally” when used with the predicates be well pleased or delight. It appears that εὐδοκέω ἐν τινί would map well onto ‘be well pleased/delight in something.’
The second reason is that Bible translations in general are very conservative with iconic verses. It is no surprise that all major English Bible translations essentially follow the KJV on this verse. The third reason for the “emotion” translation, however, is more robust. There are some examples that do seem to refer to a positive emotion.
- ὅτι εὐδοκεῖ κύριος ἐν λαῷ αὐτοῦ καὶ ὑψώσει πραεῖς ἐν σωτηρίᾳ. (Psa 149:3-4)
‘because the lord delights in his people, and he will lift up the humble with salvation.’
- ἐὰν ὑποστείληται, οὐκ εὐδοκεῖ ἡ ψυχή μου ἐν αὐτῷ (Hab 2:4)
‘If he withdraws, my soul does not delight in him.’
Notice, all the unambiguous examples have a key feature in common—they are found in the present/luo form. Indeed, this is consistent in both the LXX and NT. I say “unambiguous” because there are many cases where someone “approves” someone or something that they do have positive emotions towards. For example, BDAG lists 2 Kgms 22:20 as the first example of ‘be well pleased, take delight’:
- καὶ ἐξήγαγέν με εἰς πλατυσμὸν καὶ ἐξείλατό με, ὅτι εὐδόκησεν ἐν ἐμοί.
‘and he led me out into a large space and he rescued me, because he approved me/delighted in me.’
This comes in the middle of David’s “song of deliverance.” The question is whether David’s statement is best understood as referring to God having a positive emotion about David or God having approved him to lead as king. We know that both are true, and neither fits the context better than the other. In contrast, a verse like Psa 151:5 probably refers to David’s brothers not being approved/chosen by God in contrast to him:
- καὶ ἔχρισέν με ἐν τῷ ἐλαίῳ τῆς χρίσεως αὐτοῦ. οἱ ἀδελφοί μου καλοὶ καὶ μεγάλοι, καὶ οὐκ εὐδόκησεν ἐν αὐτοῖς κύριος. (Psa 151:4b-5)
‘and he anointed me with the oil of his anointing. My brothers were beautiful and big, and the lord did not approve them.’
The contrast between David and his brothers is very similar to what we saw in 1 Macc 10:47 where the people approved of Alexander rather than Demetrius. David says that God anointed him rather than his brothers. This is not to say that God did not delight in his brothers. In the context, the issue at hand is not God’s delight in one party over the other but God’s choice between David and his brothers.
Before moving onto performatives, we must address a potential counterargument to this data, namely that the argument ἐν τινί is mapping onto a direct object in English in ‘approve someone/something.’ This was part of the reason why we suggested English translations have opted for ‘delight/be well pleased.’ However, English is notorious for having an extremely broad accusative case. This means that the same argument that might surface as an accusative argument in English (like ‘approve him’) might surface as a PP complement or an oblique argument (i.e. an argument in dative or genitive case) in another language. This seems to be at least part of what is happening here. The verb εὐδοκέω can take an accusative argument , a dative argument , an infinitive complement , or a PP complement . There does not seem to be a clear distinction in meaning when these various arguments are used, but the data does suggest a difference between εὐδοκέω used with the luo form versus the aorist. Given what we have said about the meaning of εὐδοκέω and the meaning of luo and the aorist, this difference is understandable. The verb εὐδοκέω cannot necessarily refer to a positive emotion like delight does, but there are some contexts where this does seem to be the meaning. A positive emotion would be a state, and we have seen that the luo form combines easily with states, whereas the aorist does not. It would make sense for the luo form to normally select the positive emotion sense of εὐδοκέω. On the other hand, this verb usually does not refer to a state, but refers to an event of approving or accepting something where no positive state is entailed (though it may be inferred at times). Because the aorist would be the natural form to refer to an event with an endpoint, it is normally used for the approval sense of εὐδοκέω. Since the aorist is found in Mark 1:11, it is this sense that is most relevant for our passage.
Performatives across languages and in Greek
The philosopher J. L. Austin was the first to describe performatives, and his description of them involved two essential characteristics: 1) “they do not ‘describe’…anything at all,” i.e. they “are not ‘true or false;’” and 2) “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action” (Austin 1975:5). Austin then provides several examples of performatives:
- a. ‘I do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)’—as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony.
b. ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’—as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem.
c. ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’—as occurring in a will.
d. ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.’
These examples could all be updated to be more intelligible to twenty-first century English speakers, but in each case, it is clear that the uttering of the sentence is not a statement being used to convey information. When a bride or groom utters “I do,” something happens, namely a commitment that changes the legal status of the individuals. By declaring the name of a previously unnamed object, the object’s name changes. By writing something in your will, ownership will change when the condition is met. By saying I bet you, a real offer is thereby made. In every case, the world is changed in some way by virtue of the sentence being uttered, and the person changing the world is the speaker. This implies that the speaker must meet the prerequisites for performing the action, such as being in the middle of a legal wedding ceremony (11a), having ownership over the ship (11b) or one’s inheritance (11c), or possessing the authority to make a bet (11d). Austin discusses these “felicity conditions” in detail (1975:13-15), but we might summarize them as requiring the speaker to possess the authority to perform the action through uttering it.
Not only do these sentences have similar kinds of effects on the world, but they also share several grammatical properties. First, the first word in each sentence is a pronoun in 1st person. If the speaker is the one who is doing something by virtue of uttering the sentence, this makes perfect sense. The speaker can only declare what he or she is doing as the utterance is made. Second, the verbs are all things that can be done by the subject, i.e. they are actions and not states and are also not physical actions. Performatives are not used with stative verbs like I am hereby tired or purely physical actions like I hereby touch you. Third, at least in English the adverb hereby is possible with performatives and signals to the hearer that the action described in the statement is being done by virtue of it being uttered. Fourth and finally, the verb form is always in the simple present.
The first and second grammatical properties should remain constant across languages because they are essential to the definition of what it means to be a performative and are not dependent upon language-specific features. However, other languages will, of course, have their own adverbs that signal the performative use (or may not have an adverb at all to signal it), and the verb form might also vary. Indeed, Fortuin’s study on performatives across 106 languages finds that there are only tendencies for which verbal forms are used, and “it is not possible to formulate simple and straightforward universally valid rules which predict the TA [tense-aspect marking] of performatives in a particular language” (2019:4). For our purposes, the primary issue is whether past tense morphemes can be used for true performatives. Near the end of a lengthy discussion of tense in performatives, Fortuin explains that some verb forms do indeed appear to be true past tenses (2019:25, 29):
This implies that performatives, which are expressed by verbs referring to dynamic events, should have a past time reference. Similarly, in many languages which employ a perfective performative the same form is used for a recent or immediate past (Kirundi, Luganda, Lucazi, Mian, Totonac). In my view, a speaker using such a form may very well be said to express both the idea of totality and the idea of completion at the moment of speech, implying that when the sentence is uttered the action is completed (i.e. past). This is also suggested by Amharic (Manahlot 1988: 626), where the imperfective, instead of the perfective seems to be used of the action has relevance past the moment of speech (e.g. in the case of ‘beg’), whereas the perfective is used in contexts where in the mind of the speaker the action has already been completed before the sentence is uttered (e.g. in the case of ‘decide’)…I therefore conclude that (with the exception of Old Russian and possibly Latin) the occurrence of perfective (past tense) or perfect performatives can be explained in terms of their aspectual-temporal meaning, which expresses an event as complete and therefore completed (i.e. performed) the moment the sentence is finished.
The data from Fortuin’s study suggests that a past-tense form is not semantically incompatible with performatives, even if we would never say I hereby named this ship the ‘Queen Elizabth’ in English.
Corien Bary’s study (2012) on the Ancient Greek tragic aorist investigates the Greek data from a semantics perspective and attempts to explain how a past-perfective form could be used for a performative. She notes that performatives can be found in both the present/luo form as well as the aorist. Her reasoning is that performatives should semantically require perfective aspect, since the entire situation is included in the time when the utterance takes place, but they should also be present tense because the action happens in the speaker’s present as the utterance is taking place. Since Greek lacks a present-perfective form, it has to accommodate by using either an imperfective-present form or a perfective-past form. Both strategies are employed, but the result is that there is a mismatch between the semantic value of the verb form and the meaning of the performative. There is certainly some merit to this argument. No language has a dedicated “performative” form, and languages will often “accommodate” to specific uses by using less than ideal forms instead of developing a form for each use (which would almost endlessly multiple forms). In this explanation, the past tense meaning of the aorist would be suppressed, or in Bary’s words, it is “not interpreted” (2012:48). Likewise, the imperfective interpretation of the luo form would not be interpreted when it is used as a performative.
Fortuin’s explanation differs in that a semantic explanation is given for past performatives. One thing that makes his analysis more attractive is that the cross-linguistic data would seem to require such an explanation even in the absence of the Greek data. Some languages use past-perfective forms for performatives, and this needs to be explained. Instead of revising our semantics of the past or not interpreting it (as Bary does), Fortuin suggests, with whom I agree, that we should revise our semantics of the performative. Performatives are not necessarily present. They are use with a present tense form in English, but this does not mean that they are incompatible with past tense forms in other tense and aspect systems. Indeed, the data suggest they are not. At least in some languages, performatives can be thought of as events that occur in the past in the sense that by the end of the utterance, the event is indeed in the past. With these considerations in mind as well as our analysis of εὐδοκέω, we are finally set up to interpret God’s statement to Jesus at his baptism.
The interpretation of εὐδόκησα in Mark 1:11 (and Matt 3:17; 7:5; Luke 3:22; 2 Pet 1:17)
The first hint that ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα in Mark 1:11 should be understood as a performative is the fact that the verb is in first person. This meets the first grammatical condition for being a performative. Second, we need the correct verb. This is where every English translation excludes the possibility of understanding the clause as a performative. Since performatives require something to happen by virtue of the utterance being made, we have said that they are incompatible with states where nothing happens. The predicates delight and be well pleased are both states, so they would exclude the performative reading in English. However, our analysis of εὐδοκέω showed that the verb only rarely maps onto states with a positive emotion, which the predicates delight and be well pleased would entail. In fact, the data unambiguously show that εὐδοκέω cannot entail a positive emotion, and when it is used with the aorist, it often refers to an action of acceptance or approval with no certain kind of emotion attached to it. While we can certainly infer that God has a positive emotion towards Jesus from the context (since he just called him ‘beloved’), it is not the verb εὐδόκησα that specifies this emotion.
Not only is ‘approve’ an event, but it is also the kind of event we need for a performative. In virtue of the utterance being made by the speaker, the argument of the verb would be ‘approved.’ The subject, God, also has the authority to make the pronouncement of Jesus’s approval and would affect something in the world by uttering such a statement. The surrounding crowd would recognize that Jesus would not just be someone whom God loved, but he would also be the individual approved and commission by God, marking the start of Jesus’s public ministry.
For all these reasons, the clause ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα is best understood as a performative, and this alters the meaning of the verse, at least compared to the typical English translations. God is not declaring that he delights in his Son—he is announcing his approval to his audience at the start of Jesus’s ministry. When the utterance is made, something happens in the world. Jesus becomes one approved by God to the crowd, and it is not coincidence that he then immediately starts his ministry (after being tempted in the wilderness). Having God’s stamp of approval and receiving it in front of John the Baptist and his followers, Jesus then sets out to preach and usher in the Kingdom of God. We conclude that God’s statement to Jesus should be understood as, “You are my beloved son. I approve you.”
Footnotes
This is not to suggest that all instances of εὐδοκέω in luo have this interpretation. A passage like EsdA 4:39 refers to habitual ‘approving’ of the deeds of truth. There is no emotion in this example, but there is a recognition that the deeds of personified truth are righteous.
Besides those listed above, the examples I consider to be unambiguous are Psa 146:10, 11; Sir 37:28; 2 Cor 5:8; Heb 10:38 (quote of Hab 2:4).
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