The following is excerpted from an article in the Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society, Vol. 21, Spring 2008, Number 40, pp. 29-31. This article demonstrates that the present tense Greek does not necessarily imply continuing action.
INTRODUCING JOHN'S GOSPEL:
IN THE UPPER ROOM WITH
JESUS THE CHRIST
Part 1 of 2
ZANE C. HODGES
Copyright © 2008 by Kerugma, Inc.
I. introduction
John 13-17 contains a special body of material. In popular communication it is often called The Upper Room Discourse.
This is not precisely accurate. John 14:31 indicates the point at which Jesus and His disciples left the upper room. (Jesus says: "Arise, let us go from here.") But John 15-16 continues the discourse, and the prayer of John 17 concludes it. Most writers now refer to John 13-17 as "The Last Discourse."
The material in these chapters is unique to John's Gospel. By contrast, the Synoptic Gospels are relatively brief in describing our Lord's final interaction with his eleven disciples (cf. Matt in 26:17-30; Mark 14:17-26; Luke 22:14-38). For many reasons, we need to pay closer attention to The Last Discourse. We need to examine again its actual role in the Gospel of John.
II. A fundamental premise
A fundamental premise is that the purpose of the Gospel of John is evangelistic. This purpose is quite clearly stated in John 20:30-31. Nevertheless, I am well aware that the subject of John's purpose is debated in the current technical literature.
During the 20th century Raymond E. Brown was probably the premier Johannine scholar in the English speaking world. He was a lifelong Roman Catholic, and an ordained priest, of moderately liberal persuasion. His magisterial two-volume commentary on John remains a goldmine for all students of the Fourth Gospel. He passed away suddenly on Augusts, 1998.
The year before his death Brown published a massive volume (over 900 pages) entitled An Introduction to the New Testament. It distilled his enormous scholarly knowledge. In that volume he comments on the issue of John's purpose:
Luke explains his purpose at the beginning of his Gospel (1:1-4), but John saves his statement of intention till the end. In selecting material to be included in the Gospel his goal has been to have people come to faith or increase in faith (disputed reading) in Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, and through this faith to possess eternal life in his name.1
This pretty well reflects the state of affairs even a decade later. Brown rightly locates the center of the discussion in the textual problem found in John 20:31. The problem concerns the presence or absence of a single letter (a sigma) in the phrase "that you might believe" (hina pisteu[s]ate). With it, the verb is aorist; without it, present.
Those who deny the evangelistic purpose of John's Gospel typically depend heavily on the present tense. They think that the present suggests the idea, "that you might continue to believe." The 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland GNT indicates that the present tense is found in three old manuscripts plus a few others; the rest support the aorist.
Actually it makes no difference at all which reading is accepted. The view that the present tense supports the idea of "continue to believe" is a semantic fallacy. This was pointed out as long ago as 1975 by Johannes P. Louw. Louw was the co-editor with Eugene Nida of the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains,2
In 1975 Louw published an article, "Verbal Aspect in the First Letter of John," in the journal Neotestamentica. There Louw states:
The Greek praesens [present tense] is aspectually neutral or unmarked, it is a zero tense. It... may be used if the context suggests linear or habitual occurrence, and often verbs denoting processes . . . give the impression that the praesens signifies duration though the praesens itself merely states the occurrence as a fact.3
On the next page he adds, "it is a zero tense of factual actuality."4
I know, of course, that this is not what was taught in Greek classrooms for the last several generations. Most scholars were weaned on the idea that the present tense expressed on-going, or continuous, action. But this idea is a grammatical fallacy. If you read your Greek NT with the same facility you do English, you can easily see for yourself that Louw's position is a slam dunk.
I am sorry to say this, but you can get a reputation as a Greek scholar without reading your Greek NT that easily. That's because the field of NT Greek is loaded to the max with helpful tools—with lexicons, grammars, word studies, commentaries, the whole nine yards. You don't need to know very much to use all these tools. The number of skilled semanti-cists like Louw is quite small. I once heard some lectures by his co-editor, Eugene Nida, reputed to be a linguistic genius. I suspect Louw is not too far behind.
Of course, not everyone has fallen into the "tense trap." You can find a competent, conservative defense of John's evangelistic purpose in Carson, Moo, and Morris's An Introduction to the New Testament.5
What's the bottom line? It is simply this. Neither in John 20:30-31, nor anywhere else in the Fourth Gospel as far as I can tell, does John employ the present tense of the verb pisteuo ("believe") with any suggestion of continuous action. The idea that John's purpose was to get people to "continue to believe" does not have a shred of linguistic evidence.
It is an idea based on a zero tense and it has zero probability.
1 Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York:Doubleday, 1997), p. 360.
2 Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the NewTestament Based on Semantic Domains, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York: United BibleSocieties, 1988, 1989).
3 J. P. Louw, "Verbal Aspect in the First Letter of John," Neotestamentica 9(1975): 102.
4 Ibid., 103.
5 D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo, and Leon Morris, An Introduction to theNew Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), pp. 168-72.
