Having a great time at ETS/SBL in Baltimore. Always fun to see friends and make new ones. Talking with a guy at Accordance, and he had a good question.
Are you familiar with the grammatical category called the “instantaneous imperfect”? To any first year Greek student, this sounds like a contradiction. Isn’t the imperfect always, well, imperfective? Continuous?
Matthew 5:2 says that Jesus “opened his mouth and taught them, saying” (καὶ ἀνοίξας τὸ στόμα αὐτοῦ ἐδίδασκεν αὐτοὺς λέγων). If you were in a sarcastic mood you might respond, “How else would he teach?
In this day and age, this is obviously a controversial verse, but it is chock full of interesting Greek tidbits, not the least of which is semantic range.
My pastor preaches out of the NIV 1984, and I tend to follow along in the 2011. Every once in a while I come across a significant change, and at first glance the passage Sunday looked like the NIV 2011 dropped out an entire phrase.
