D.A. Carson on the Aorist tense

“The aorist, after all, is well-named: it is aorist, without a place, undefined. It simply refers to the action itself without specifying whether the action is unique, repeated, ingressive, instantaneous, past, or accomplished. The best grammarians understood this well, and used the term punctiliar much the way a mathematician uses the term point in geometry—to refer to a location without magnitude.

Stagg proceeded to give numerous counterexamples, a few of which I now pass on:

“so then, my loved ones, as you have always obeyed” (ὑπηκούσατε [hypekousate], Phil. 2:12)—clearly not a once-for-all action or a temporally punctiliar action;

“but you, whenever you pray, go into (ἔισελθε [eiselthe]) your room” (Matt. 6:6)—again, repetition is presupposed;

“what you have heard (ἠκούσατε [ēkousate]) from the beginning” (1 John 2:24, NIV)—clear extension over time;

“five times I received (ἔλαβον [elabon]) the thirty-nine lashes” (2 Cor. 11:24);

“they lived (ἔζήσαν [edzēsan]) and reigned (ἐβασίλευσαν [ebasileusan]) a thousand years” (Rev. 20:4);

“these all died (ἀπέθανον [apethanon]) in faith” (Heb. 11:13)—but clearly not all at the same time!;

“transgressions and sins, in which you used to walk (περιεπατήσατε [periepatēsate]) when you followed the ways of the world” (Eph. 2:1–2).

Even in the indicative, where the aorist usually refers to some action in past time, the pastness of the time cannot be counted on:

“in you I am well pleased” (εὐδόξησα [eudoxēsa], Mark 1:11) “the grass withers” (ἐξήράνθη [exēranthē], 1 Peter 1:24, NIV).

Just as the meaning of a word in any context is established in part by the set of relations that word enters into with its context, so also the meaning of a tense in any context is established in part by the set of relations that tense enters into with its context. As a word is not infinitely plastic, but brings a certain broad semantic range with it before it is shaped by the context, outside of which range the meaning of the word will only rarely move (as when a word takes on new meanings), so a tense is not infinitely plastic, but brings a certain broad semantic range with it before it is shaped by the context, outside of which range the meaning of the tense will only rarely move. ...the very reason why the aorist tense can, in its relations with specific contexts, portray an immense range of kinds of action, is precisely because it is more plastic than the other tenses. It has a more poorly defined semantic shape than other tenses.

... the aorist as aorist, whatever it means, cannot of itself be thought to take on certain values (inceptive, gnomic, or whatever): the point is made as soon as you put down an aorist form of any Greek verb on a piece of paper and ask what kind of aorist it is. The question is a nonstarter: it simply makes no sense, until one provides a broader context. On the other hand, useful distinctions can be made from context to context, provided the grammarian recognizes—and all too few do—that such distinctions are prompted by the interaction of the aorist form and the surrounding context. Linguistically, this means we should distinguish between the “semantics” (“meaning”) of the morphological form and the “pragmatics” (of the context).

Increasingly, grammarians who are linguistically trained argue for some such meaning as the following: the aorist tense “grammaticalizes” (that is, it puts into morphological form, into grammar) the author’s or speaker’s conceptualization of an event as a complete[9] event. I know that sounds complicated. But the point of such a definition is that there is no one-to-one connection between the Greek tense-form and the time of the action, or between the Greek tense-form and the kind of action (as if a certain kind of action absolutely demands a specific tense), but between the Greek tense-form and the author’s choice of how the action will be conceived.

Excerpt From

Exegetical Fallacies

D. A. Carson

https://books.apple.com/us/book/exegetical-fallacies/id653485555