What If The Fields Are White? (John 4:27-42) Series

Today's message was a little short, so I'm going to try to cheat a little at the start, and explain something that may open up the Bible to you in really unexpected ways. And then, I'll try to show you a little how it works, and how cool this is, as I go through today's passage. My hope, is that I'll give you a tool to forever change how you read your NT-- especially NT stories-- and you don't have to learn a single Greek word.

Let me start by teaching you a little about how Greek verbs work. I'll use an English example-- I promise-- no Greek. So here's the sentence:

"One day Randy was fishing,

and he fell out of the boat."

In the first line, we have the verb "was fishing." In Greek, this would be an imperfect verb, but English uses a helping verb-- "was/were" doing X. Imperfects are used for three main, overlapping, purposes (there are other less common uses I'll ignore; this is based on Albert Rijksbaron's book):

(1) To paint a background picture. It used be, in children's church, that teachers would tell stories using flannel boards. There would be this background material-- the Jerusalem temple, or the Red Sea, or the Garden of Eden. You pick the background that matches the passage you're teaching on. And then the teacher would attach people to the front of it, and move them around, and tell the story.

Imperfect verbs often work like flannel boards. They paint pictures, and flesh out details in the story.

(2) To create an expectation that something else is going to follow. When you read that Randy "was" fishing, you expect that something else is going to happen.

(3) As a summary statement (see Acts 2:42-47, "was" and "were" verbs in Young's Literal Translation, biblegateway.com, and compare even to a KJV. In today's passage, John 4:42).

So that was imperfect verbs. Imperfects are the flannel board verbs. Now, let's return to my example:

"One day Randy was fishing,

and he fell out of the boat."

In the second line of my English example, we read this: "and he fell out of the boat." In the Greek, in narratives, this would be either an aorist (=simple past tense) or present tense (=historical present). Aorist and present tense verbs form the backbone of stories-- the sequence of events: Randy fished. Randy caught fish. Randy went home. Randy bragged about his fish to his friends. Randy told no one he fell out of the boat.

These verbs provide the story line-- the sequence of events.

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Albert Rijksbaron, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek, Third Edition, page 11:

"Imperfect and aorist indicative are predominantly used in narrative texts. By locating the various states of affairs in time relative to each other they serve as the most important structuring elements in a story.

Since the imperfect characterizes the state of affairs as 'not-completed' it creates a framework within which other states of affairs may occur, while the aorist indicative characterizes the state of affairs as 'completed', as a mere event. The difference in value between imperfect and aorist indicative is significant for the way in which a story is told. The imperfect creates a certain expectation on the part of the reader/hearer: what else happened?; the aorist indicative, on the other hand, does not have this effect; the state of affairs has simply occurred."

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When we read biblical stories, knowing how these verbs work (=function) helps us appreciate how authors tell their stories, and they help us focus on the things we are supposed to. Once you understand this, it's really, really cool.

Our problem, as readers of English Bibles, is that translations don't necessarily believe this. They don't understand how important it is to be able to see what's an imperfect, and what's an aorist or present tense. They mess with them, and change them, and the newer translations (NIV, NLT) are more likely to do this than the older ones (NASB, KJV). But really, there is only one single translation that is usually careful to show you, the reader, what's an imperfect: Young's Literal Translation (which can be found at biblegateway online).

As I was reading John 4, I was struck by how AJ alternates between imperfects, and aorists/present tense. So what I'll do today is put sentences with imperfects in italics. I'm not going to make a big deal about all of them-- I'll leave some comments to the footnotes. But I think it helps you to see the flow of the story, and it really helps us understand the story at a critical point (4:30-32).

[And what you could do, maybe, is buy a copy of Young's Translation, and highlight sentences that have an imperfect "was/were" verb.]