Biblical Greek conveys an amazing depth of understanding because of its vast, nuanced vocabulary and its use of verb tenses that add implicit meaning to a text. It is precisely because every word and every tense in Greek has such meaning that disputes over how they are translated are inevitable. One such controversy is the one over whether aorist is a tense or an aspect. Tenses denote where an action is positioned in the context of time; present tense refers to something that is happening now, while past tense has already occurred. The aorist as a tense refers to a past action that occurred at an unspecified time ("Greek Verbs Quick Reference"). The aorist tense denotes an effective/successful one-time action, and "It is analogous to a snapshot which captures an action at [a] specific point in time" ("Greek Verbs Quick Reference"). The aorist has been identified by Stan Porter, however, as an aspect rather than a tense-a kind of action that has no temporal importance-and this has sparked debate. While it is understood that the action had to take place somewhere in time, the time is not the issue in an aorist statement; it is the action that is the focus. Therefore, Porter insists that the aorist is about aspect, not about tense. According to Stephen Voorwinde (205), Porter posits that "The aorist tense-form occurs in contexts where the user of Greek wishes to depict an action as a complete and undifferentiated process." Buist M. Fanning takes issue with Porter's insistence that there is no temporal value at all is conveyed by the aorist, arguing that "[T]he linguistic evidence is overwhelming that in the indicative forms the tenses carry a double sense of time and aspect together" (Voorwinde 207). Although both sides of the debate have merit, Fanning's insight is more nuanced than Porter's, and thus more consistent with the nature of Biblical Greek. This can be seen in most of the following
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