Chapters 3 to 5 are where Campbell analyzes the data. If you are able, I encourage you to have a Greek New Testament open as we go through the examples. I am digging into the weeds of the data because our analyses are only as good as they account for the data. The basic structure of each chapter will be me presenting Campbell’s view of the various aspects and contrasting that with the accepted views in linguistics. We will then go through each of the examples Campbell cites, as well as some of my own from the New Testament, to see how the two theories stack up against each other. Again, my aim in doing this is to help students see the differences between Campbell’s theory and that espoused by aspectologists today.
Campbell starts chapter 3 with a definition of perfective aspect where he describes it as “an all-encompassing, or summary, view of an action” where the “details” are “not appreciated.” The difficult thing about such a claim is that it is not falsifiable. In other words, I don’t know when the details of an event are unappreciated enough to make it fit this definition, so I don’t know how to test whether Campbell’s theory is correct. And what criteria could be given for how “detailed” an event description is in the first place?
Again, it must be stressed that Campbell is making a claim about perfective aspect and not just a particular form in Koine Greek. The definition he provides should work for all languages with forms that encode perfective aspect. To illustrate how Campbell’s analysis differs from modern aspectologists, we can look at Daniel Altshuler’s definition of the perfective in Slavic languages, which he gives the following formula for. I am not going to attempt to explain e verything going on in this formula in a 10-minute video, but it gives you a taste of what aspectologists are doing to define aspect today. Altshuler’s basic idea is that perfective aspect requires that a maximal stage of an event be reached, and he defines what a stage of an event is and what it means to reach such a stage. With a definition like this, we can determine whether he is right or wrong by looking at the data. If there are examples where the Slavic perfective does not refer to a maximal stage of an event as he defines it, his definition is wrong.
So the question is are the linguists correct about perfective aspect or the New Testament scholars, such as Campbell and those he cites in chapter 2 who agree that aspect is spatial? Let’s see how each group would explain the data.
Campbell cites Matthew 4:21-22 as an illustration of aorists that do “not view the details of how the action took place.” He explains that the three aorists εἶδεν ‘saw’, ἐκάλεσεν ‘called’, and ἠκολούθησαν ‘followed’ are summaries and not details. He says, “We are not told what Jesus said when he called them. We are not told about James’s and John’s thoughts in response to Jesus. We are not told whether they spoke to their father as they left him in the boat. We are told, quite simply, that they followed Jesus, and that’s that.”
Campbell seems to suggest that if we were told what Jesus said when he called them or what James and John were thinking, we would not have the aorist. But how descriptive is the aorist allowed to be? For example 1 Thessalonians 4:7 says that ‘God did not call us for impurity’ οὐ γὰρ ἐκάλεσεν ἡμᾶς ὁ θεὸς ἐπὶ ἀκαθαρσίᾳ. There is more “detail” here in that what we have been called for is specified. And then there is Luke 14:16 where we again have the aorist indicative verb ἐκάλεσεν. The following verse gives an explanation of what was said in the invitation and the manner in which the person invited everyone to his feast. Thus, there are a fair amount of details given here about the calling event, but the aorist is still used. Without Campbell specifying what it means for an event description to be detailed or not, it is not possible to prove or disprove his claim about what the aorist means.
Linguists would not analyze a perfective morpheme like the aorist as having to do with the level of descriptiveness of the eventuality being described. It simply says that there is some temporal boundary being referred to, whether the beginning or end of the eventuality. We can nuance that definition of perfective aspect, and indeed, it has been nuanced in linguistics: we have said that Altshuler calls it a max stage of an eventuality, Carlotta Smith says it “includes the initial and final endpoint”, and WALS says that is the normal form to refer to a “single completed event in the past.” In each case, the essential definition is the same: a temporal boundary must be included.
The aorist indicatives in Matthew 4:21-22 conform to this definition. Each of the event descriptions include the end of the event. Jesus saw (εἶδεν) two other brothers, that is, the event of Jesus perceiving them with his eyes actually took place and ended. After that, he called (ἐκάλεσεν) them. This calling event is also presented as having occurred and ended, as indicated by the response of James and John responding to the call. They respond by following (ἠκολούθησαν) Jesus. Again, this is an event where the end is reached. It is not talking about James and John following Jesus over the course of their lives. It just means that they did what Jesus called them to do. He wanted them to leave their boat and father and join the group of followers. They did that. Event over.
Besides Campbell’s wrong definition of perfective aspect which leads to the wrong analysis, he also claims that the aorist indicative does not encode tense. The one example he gives is Mark 1:11, though he says 15% of the examples do not refer to past tense. I have another 10-minute video on why this is not a counterexample, which you can check out for yourself. The short explanation of Mark 1:11 is that this use falls into a special category called performatives. As a performative, the speaker’s speech enacts the event itself. Hence, the event begins and ends with the speaker’s speech. By the time God finishes saying ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα, the event has ended. Because the event ends when the utterance is over, some languages allow for past tense forms to be used for performatives. Koine Greek is one such language. There are also examples in Classical Greek as well for this use of the aorist, and you can check out Corien Bary’s semantic explanation for it (which I don’t agree with entirely, but I do think is essentially correct). Campbell does not get into the other 15% of instances where the aorist is supposedly not past, but my claim is that they can all be accounted for with the proper understanding of tense and aspect. Going through the other examples is a project for another day.
Campbell rejects a tense analysis of the aorist in favor of a remoteness analysis, which he describes as “the metaphorical value of distance.” It is true that some languages, such as Zulu, encode remoteness in verbal forms, but this is always remoteness in time. The remote past tense is more distant temporally from the speaker than the recent past. Campbell seems to essentially say that the aorist is remote not in terms of temporality but in terms of descriptiveness, much like how he described perfective aspect. He says that with a remote form, “the view is a summary view precisely because the parade is viewed from a distance.” However, Campbell goes on to say that remoteness may also be temporal and is so 85% of the time. Besides presenting remoteness as a “summary-view”, Campbell also mentions “logical remoteness.”
Campbell uses the idea of remoteness to explain Mark 1:11. In Campbell’s explanation of Mark 1:11, he seems to suggest that remoteness is spatial. He says, “Certain things in the context indicate that this assessment comes from heaven itself and breaks into the earthly scene…The effect of these elements is that the “verdict” of heaven upon Jesus is being delivered from heaven to earth, as it were,” and again “this scene is depicted from a vantage point somewhat similar to a helicopter–namely, from heaven itself.” I don’t know how to understand this if it is not spatial, and as I pointed out in a previous video, verbal forms do not encode spatial categories.
But the deeper issue with this is that it does not explain other performative examples in Greek more broadly. Performatives are rare, so we should not expect many examples in the New Testament. While it might be true that heaven is spatially distant from earth (though I would not want to make that kind of claim about ancient cosmology from the use of the aorist in this passage), this explanation does not work for other performative aorists found in Greek literature more broadly. Corien Bary cites an example from E uripides which says τὸ δὲ πρόθυμον ᾔνεσα. ‘but I approve your eagerness.’ There is no sense in which Iphigenia can be argued to be distant from Orestes in this example. The temporal explanation, however, works for all such examples where the two interlocutors are not spatially remote.
The last examples of the perfective in the chapter are from Matthew 8:32-34 which are about Jesus casting the demons out of the pigs. Campbell describes the effect of the narrative aorist as follows: “In just three short verses, a huge amount of action is portrayed. The story moves from Jesus casting out the evil spirits right through to the town casting out Jesus. The passage is fast, compressed, and covers a lot of ground. Such is the effect of the narrative aorist. Narratives usually provide more information besides the skeletal outline of events, but such details are typically conveyed by other tense-forms.” (pg. 38)
My understanding of Campbell here is that the aorist is used because a lot of details are skipped over. It is used to “cover a lot of ground”, which seems to mean that it portrays a lot of different events that extend over a fairly long period of time. However, there are plenty of instances where the aorist is used in narrative to describe successive detailed events that occur very close to one another in time. For example, Matthew 9:32-33 presents another instance of Jesus casting out a demon. Verse 32 says that a man was brought to Jesus, and the aorist indicative προσήνεγκαν is used. The next aorist indicative is in verse 33 ἐλάλησεν ὁ κωφός ‘the mute man spoke’, and then the final aorist indicative is ἐθαύμασαν οἱ ὄχλοι ‘the crowds marveled.’ Again, without any criteria on what counts as detailed or “covering a lot of ground,” it is difficult for me to know what Campbell would say about a passage like this. However, these seem to be events that are extremely close together in time, and the mute man speaking and the crowd marveling seem to be details of the event of Jesus casting out a demon. If the aorist indicative encodes a “summary view” of eventualities as a semantic value, we should not expect examples like these.
The temporal explanation for temporal succession is very simple, and it is, again, standard in linguistics. Perfective forms are typically used for narrative progression because they refer to temporal boundaries. Narrative is, by definition, successive events in time. By referring to different events with temporal boundaries (that is, by using different verbs all with perfective aspect), the effect is that one event happens after the next in the story. Sometimes the events are actually very close in time and represent details of a story. At other times, the events are, in reality, quite spread out over time. The level of detail is not determined by the perfective but by the verbs that are chosen and how they relate to one another. For a linguistics discussion, I would refer you to the oft -cited by Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides “Temporal interpretation, discourse relations, and commonsense entailment.”
According to Campbell’s description of the aorist, it encodes perfective aspect and remoteness. Perfective aspect is described as a summary, non-detailed view of the eventuality. Remoteness is described as a summary view, temporal remoteness, logical remoteness, or spatial remoteness. It is easy for these views to become circular without more precise definitions for what counts as “detailed” vs. a “summary” or “remote” vs. “proximate”. No criteria has been given for an event description being “summary enough” to qualify for the speaker to use the aorist or the speaker being “distant enough” in detail, temporality, logicality, or space to use the aorist. In his explanations, Campbell then inserts his description of the aorist into the data, but that description is the very thing we are trying to test against the data. The temporal view of the aorist is very simple: we should expect all aorist forms to refer to a temporal boundary of an event and to a time that occurs prior to a contextually salient temporal anchor. Not only do all linguists hold to this view of the perfective, but they do so because it fits the data in language after language.
