Thanks for the perspective. I was in seminary during the debate, and Stan was my second year Greek prof. I also TAed for his first year class at TWU, and did a papyri readings class with him. My point was not to try and solve the aspect issue, as much as to ask what will it take to move it forward. Con’s Zondervan volume seems like an opportunity, but what are we going to do with it? I am not talking about crowning Con king, but about using the huge surge in interest in verbal asepct to organize a productive discussion about the matter. I do not have a dog in this fight, and will leave it to you and the other aspect specialists to winnow down a “to do” list of what needs resolving yet. Based on the blogs, much of it seems to hinge on terminology, not so much the framework.

My hope is that there would be an opportunity for to hear the aspect-only/primarily folks provide their account of what Buth and others would consider to be temporal usage. Then Buth and others would give an account of the usage that seems to counter the temporal idea in favor of aspect-only. If each understood the other’s system well enough to interact with it, and to make it clear enough for non-specialists to follow, that would be what I consider to be progress. It would take a lot of advance work to pull such a thing off, and it would take a willingness of the parties involved to respectfully engage the other. We can talk more about this if you are interested. I do not think this would make one big happy family, but it would sure narrow down the specific differences and well as the common ground. This is the kind of progress I am talking about. If non-specialists could understand it, they could make their own judgments based on the merits of the explanation and exegesis. This is what scholarship is about, this is what I signed up for when I started grad school, not trench warfare. We have already established in the Great War that it is a colossal waste of time and resources.

Thanks for the comments, and thanks for affirming the thrust of the post. I will try to make the corrections you noted should be made. Thanks for your attention to detail.

First I’d note that McKay was the impetus for the work of Fanning and Porter, not a follower. Both cite him in their work. Some of his material was published after F & P were published and he does interact with it, but McKay’s work goes back to the 1960s. I doubt that we’d have seen F or P without those initial articles by McKay. (Mari Olsen is also worth including for her work as a followup to F & P, as well as Evans.)

The panel to which you refer is the fairly well known (at least in NT grammatical circles) as the “Porter-Fanning debate.” I was present at the debate along with perhaps 300 others. Fascinating. The contrast between F & P was obvious from the start, not only in terms of approach/method and content/conclusions, but also in personality. Buist is from Charleston, SC and the proverbial southern gentleman. Stan is younger, was still single then, and obviously right out of the British university system. It took me about half the debate to figure out that these men (as well as Carson, Silva, and Schmidt—moderator and respondents) were *distinguishing* between aspect and Aktionsart. I, as well as most of my fellows, had been taught that these terms were synonymous. That was standard fare for the preceding century. I told my class the next day (it was my second year teaching) that if I understood what was being argued, I had a lot of reading and thinking to do. The upshot of that was my doctoral study two years later when I had a sabbatical. I told my advisor that the one thing I needed to resolve during that year was the aspect question. He was also thinking about these matters, so the NT majors that year spent two semesters in an advanced Greek grammar seminar with that as our goal. I went into that year heavily favoring (“prejudiced toward”) Fanning’s approach. (I’ll skip the explanations as to why.) As providence (and my advisor!) would have it, I was assigned the first half of Porter’s tome to master and introduce to my fellows in the seminar. I struggled with that assignment for weeks. I had no background in formal linguistics, so it was a challenge. Once I understood his system, however, and compared it to Fanning, I was inclined to favor Porter. My dissertation arose out of that study as a means of testing Porter to see if it would “work.” Was it adequate to explain the data in a given corpus? I’d like to think that I attempted it with a mind still open (one of your major points in your post!), though that’s hard to evaluate in the midst of the process. Buist, who was the external examiner on my dissertation, wondered if I had been or if I had gone looking for evidence to support a preconceived position. Fair question (among many other hard ones he posed during the examination!), and I think the answer is no, I was still exploring. Yes, my conclusion in essence “declared an allegiance” to Porter’s system, but I hope it was not an up-front allegiance that determined my conclusions.

Has there been “stagnation” in the field since? Depends on the criteria, I suppose, but there has continued to be work done, and a lot of it does *not* stand in line with the general system adopted. Olsen’s aspect and temporal conclusions do not match either F or P, though her Aktionsart discussion is close to Fanning. Evans worked in the LXX/Pentateuch, and proposes some significant differences. Campbell, who worked under Evans, disagrees with his mentor and comes closest to Porter, but proposes quite different views of the perfect along with some new ideas regarding Aktionsart. His view of the future is closer to Fanning. So I don’t think that there is stagnation here, not any up front declaration of allegiance. Where there has been stagnation is in the interaction with this work by NT commentary writers. Very few have attempted to address that question, though there are some. I look forward to Carson’s NIGTC vol on the Johannine Eps which promises a careful examination of this throughout the corpus. I was very disappointed with the recent BECNT vol on Mark by Stein—who never even mentions this discussion anywhere that I can find, and does not reference any of the work on aspect in his bibliog. (The comm. is useful, but very traditional in terms of the grammatical discussion.)

We need to be humble in all our pursuits no matter how many years we’ve studied, letters after our name, how well we’re paid, or how well acknowledged – allowing that we but see through a glass dimly.

Said another way – think of the story of 3 blind men describing an elephant. They were all “partially” right, but all missing something.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what Greek linguistics’ “Khirbet Qeiyafa” will be. We need one. We need to move past these debates.