Lesson 7 | Perfect Indicatives
[1] About Perfect Indicatives
In Greek II, we learned about perfect participles. Remember, outside the indicative mood, Greek verbs communicate aspect and not time. Time comes from the context around the non-indicative verb. Do you remember which aspect perfect tense-forms have? Perfect tense-forms communicate stative aspect. Stative aspect focuses on the results of an action. Consider this verse:
Τοῖς δὲ γεγαμηκόσιν παραγγέλλω... Now, I am giving this command to the married ones... —1 Corinthians 7:10
γεγαμηκόσιν is a perfect participle from the verb γαμέω: “I marry.” Notice how the stative aspect focuses us on the state that the verb’s action produced: “to those who are married.” The perfect participle here does not focus us on the action of getting married. Instead, it focuses us on the state that comes from the action: being married.
Similarly, perfect indicatives communicate stative aspect. Let’s look at Mark 1:2 to see this:
Καθὼς γέγραπται ἐν τῷ Ἠσαΐᾳ τῷ προφήτῃ· Just as it has been written in Isaiah the Prophet, —Mark 1:2
γέγραπται is a perfect, passive, indicative from γράφω. But notice where Mark wants to focus our attention. While it matters that Isaiah the prophet wrote, the author focuses us on the result of Isaiah’s action: his writings. That is why he quotes from the book of Isaiah in the next clause.
Since we are learning about perfect indicatives in this lesson, we also need to talk about time. Remember, stative aspect focuses us on the result of an action. Tense tells us when that resulting state is. The perfect indicative communicates that the results are in a non-past time from the speaker’s perspective.
For now, we will translate perfect indicatives into English by using the English present perfect tense (e.g. “they have done”). Again, perfect indicatives focus us on the present results of a past action.
Next, we turn to learn about their form.