Yeah. And the correlations there between the perfect and the present and the flu-perfect and the imperfect. That's really helpful to draw out, I think. I wonder if we move that from a narrative text to a letter in 2 Timothy 4, 7, Paul... Thanks to the

Rwanda. Yeah,

no worries. Yeah. Paul, just to remind myself as well, Paul is describing kind of the end of his life. Sorry, I'm assuming something, aren't I? Paul is writing and he says something like, the traditional translation, I think, is something like, the time for my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. These are perfect tense verbs in Greek. How does this understanding of aspect perhaps help us to understand that verse a little bit better?

Yeah, well, first of all, I'm not committed to this interpretation, but merely illustrating a potential interpretive difference that it could make. And there in 2 Timothy 4, you've got this string of perfects. So it's a really nice example to sort of contemplate. When he says the time of his departure has come, he's finished the race. Traditionally, you would have to interpret that as a rhetorical flourish because no one who knows the Apostle Paul would think that he's finished the race until he's dead. And if he's writing the letter, he's not dead. He means, of course, that he's nearly finished. He's on the home straight, you know, to Timothy's usually, you know, accepted as the last testament of Paul, written maybe Willicks before his death, possibly months, but right at the end, last written extant letter of Paul, assuming you accept Paul, which I do. But Paul isn't finished. And in fact, he's writing this letter is an example of how he's not actually finished. He's still engaged in his work. He's still involved in his ministry. And in fact, if you read the letter more broadly, you see all sorts of indications that he's still thinking about ministry, still thinking about mission. And the reason he's writing to Timothy is to extend his ministry. So he's not actually finished. The only way to say that he's finished the race is to interpret it as a rhetorical kind of bid or rhetorical flourish. And we do that, and that's human, that's natural and that's fine. And that's not an implausible interpretation. However, if you take the perfect as being imperfective in aspect, one of the interpretive possibilities that that opens up is that imperfective aspect can function to convey actions that are in progress. We see it all the time with the present. I am loosing. I am walking. I am speaking. Now, they're not all translated like that, or they're not all understood that way. But a progressive function is a very common function for imperfective aspect. So if then the perfect indicative is imperfective in aspect, then what will happen if we allow the possibility that some of those perfects are functioning to convey a progressive type of action? And that's where I sort of play with 2 Timothy 4 a little bit because it says the time my departure is coming. I am finishing the race. I am keeping the faith. I'm fighting the good fire. You know, it doesn't, it's not an impossible reading in the sense that Paul could have said that and those things would be true. And in fact, in some ways, they would be more true than the traditional reading. Because he is still, as we can see from the letter itself, he is still fighting a good fight. He is still keeping the faith. And his time of his departure is coming, but it's not quite here yet. So I think it fits with the letter. It really doesn't fit people's memory verse cherishing of those couple of verses. And I think it sort of offends a lot of people. I'm not sure why it offends them, because it's actually saying Paul is being Paul still. And it does deny that he knows that the end is coming too. Like he knows it's, it's imminent. But he's remaining active right up until the end. And I think that sounds like Paul to me. And it is what we see happening in the letter itself. So that's, that's a sort of interpretive possibility that is opened up if you are thinking aspectually about the perfect.

That's really helpful. Thank you for that. And thank you for clarifying it. It's just a possibility and not something that we have to commit ourselves to, but it does, I think, show the power of verbal aspect to maybe open up new insights. Well, Con, your book, Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek, as we've just seen and been talking about, it offers a wealth of insights. And unfortunately, we can't cover everything in one conversation. Is there a particular point or idea that we haven't discussed that maybe our listeners should know about? I think a really important part of the book and

for the discussion more widely is the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. And the reason this distinction is important is because it gives us the ability to clarify the difference between various functions that a verb can perform, is capable of performing in various contexts, and what the verb means at its essence. And if you don't have that distinction, the conversation gets very convoluted very quickly, and it becomes very difficult to gain any clarity about Greek verbs. So what I mean by this is a semantic value is a value that a verb communicates in 100% of its instances. It's built into the core meaning. That's what semantics is. It's meaning. The core meaning of a verb, of an aorist verb, of a present verb, of a perfect verb. But what pragmatics indicates is that when you put that verb, an aorist or a present or a perfect, in a text, and first of all, you're coupling it with a lexeme, and there are thousands of lexemes. Look, see, do, throw, kick. Yeah. Actions. So the first thing that's going to happen is an aorist will be lexified if you love. Like there's a lexene with the aorist. Aorists don't occur. You don't see any aorists that don't have an unattached lexene, right? That's impossible. You don't have verb endings floating around in space or something like that um with the augment as well uh right so there's there's going to be a lexeme every lexeme involved every time you see an aorist but if you change the lexeme um then that aorist is going to function a little differently and then you have factors within the context um certain words around the aorist or things that you can see happening in the context indicated by the text that will also affect the way that the aorist functions in the world of the text. the power of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is it enables us to say, okay, this is what we think the aorist means at its core. And so we can talk about what aorist, what aoristicity is, you know, a sort of platonic form of what pure aorist is, okay, which will then help us to understand how these different aorists that we see in the text might be functioning when you consider all the elements that interact with aoristness, the lexeme, the context, that sort of thing. And what we generally say is semantic values are uncancellable. They'll be there 100% of the time, every single aorist. And we're talking about aspect, we're talking about perfective aspect for the aorist, 100% uncancellable semantic value. With pragmatics, we're talking about things that can vary and flux and change depending on a full range of factors, everything that's going on in the text. So is there such a thing as a punctilio aorist? Well, there is such a thing as a punctilio function for the aorist, but not all aorists convey that function, right? It's just one of many possible functions. Or there's a summary function of the aorist, or there's an ingressive function of the aorist, right? These are functions. They're not claiming that the Aorist always conveys that function. So whenever you see an Aorist, you read it as a punctilio, that would be a mistake. And that's a mistake that traditional analyses have sometimes made. Just because some Aorists might be punctilio and function doesn't mean all Aorists are. So if you understand that pragmatics are cancelable and they on a variety of features and functions um then um you can sort of weigh those things up whenever you're looking at an heiress in the text but semantics are uncancellable um then you know that it's going to whatever the heiress is doing it's going to be conveying perfective aspect because that's uncancellable so that's's one thing that really, I think, dominates the methodology of my book and many other linguists working in Greek and other languages. Of course, with all this stuff, there's a little bit of controversy around that distinction and how firmly we should hold it and blah, blah, blah. Some people prefer different terms. All of that is out there, of course, right? But if the terms are carefully defined and carefully used, I think it's a very useful distinction that really helps us to advance the discussion as well as our exegesis and translation of the text. That

does seem really helpful. Thank you. Thank you very much for bringing up that distinction between semantics and pragmatics. I know that we've taken up a lot of your time today. I guess I wonder, before we wrap up, could you share a little bit about what you're working on or what other projects you might have planned for the future?

Yeah, sure. I'm working on a few books at the moment. A big project is a third monograph on Paul. So Paul and Union with Christ, Paul and Hope of Glory, and this third one would be called Paul and Christ Crucified. So it's a thorough examination of Paul's teaching of the death of Jesus, what that means for Paul's theology. That'll be a few years away, sort of a four or 500 page monograph. I'm working on a popular book on the concept of mercy. And just last year completed a PhD in music, which I'm publishing as a book, but I'm writing a new chapter for that. So I'll be sure to finish that within a couple of weeks. So that'll actually be my next book published as a music book.

That's amazing. Very wide-ranging scholarship from the Greek verb to music. You've got to keep it interesting, I think. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like it. It sounds like it. That's really great. Well, Con, thank you so much for sharing about these projects. They sound really great. And thank you very much for being on the show today to discuss your book, Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek. Thanks so much, Jonathan. I really enjoyed talking with you. Yeah, I appreciate it. And thank you to our listeners. Take care, everyone.