bearded bill of asheville

Back when I was newbie on the b-greek forum there was an iconoclast poster form Asheville NC who left some long winded but somewhat fascinating diatribes. I managed to track down his posts and will publish here one of them with absolutely no editing. It should not be assumed that I share any of his views on any subject whatsoever. Here is the post:

epistolary aorist
BTHURMAN [at] unca.edu
Mon, 28 Apr 1997 07:01:43 -0400 (EDT)

i'm a lurker who waited to see if anybody'd cite any epistolary aorists from papyri, cause i saw request a couple of days ago.

don't have time now to speak of who i am or to explain my shape-based plus time honored latinate equivalent transliterations (and wil never argue the point).

will preface remarks with something that may rile up a good many. if ancient understanding of xpovoc aopictoc = chronus ahoristus had been kept, namely, that use of the tense ignores definite time (so that to put it in terms most of you may buy into: such forms really offer no N O 'aspect' other than being chronus indefinitus, meant otherly than infinitivus). so. punctiliar, if it have any validity as a term, could refer only to the ignoring of perfectivity, progressivity, or anything else that the setting suggests.

let's see if i can risk this generalization: a-horistus 'without boundaries' leaves it open to be used in a setting that might be clearly imperfective, perfective or plu = plus quam = more than perfective (e.g. the way i -- surely not most of you -- reconcile john's piercing with sinaiticus of matthew: a soldier had done it. aorists for ppf. is very frequent in ogr and johannines).


now with that almost sure to be rejected, but probably reasonably correct background, let me state that in speaking of 'epistolary aorist' i'm really playing along with what i consider to be mammoth philological mistakes: if you posit that some kind of punctiliarity inheres in a form (a notion easily exploded by thousands of instances). i'm an old man and talk the way i want to and if you get anthing from me, you might let age of fingers suffice as grounds to ignore typos. wwhere was i?

if you posit. cross that out. if you presuppose the such and such forms of themselves express punctiliarity or time of this or that kind, then you have to invent category after category -- like the silly constantive, inchoative, iterative &c. &c. ad nauseam & ad nauseam -- to cover your tracks. now those are not bad descriptions of ideas that can be inferred from the settiings, but only from he settings. the only reason it can be used in such a wide, wide variety of settings will have been that it was per se indefinite.

now with that rather stuffy pedagogical looking down my nose, and justly so, at so-called greek as taught in many seminary and bible school settings, let me point out a couple of papyrological items:

oops. forgot generalization that legal documents offer opportunity to show other verbs than forms of gpafw = grapho as 'epistolary', e.g. at end of legal instruments papyrological it's frequent to have wmologhca = [h]omologesa as in 'i so-and-so openly declared/agreed' and occasionally other terms like wmwca = omosa 'i swore' or die0emhv = diethemen 'i made this here will/testament'.

some respective exempla: & i ain't givin line numbers just the key to the document. look normally at end for the terms:

poxy 8,1121 has a common thing where who actually did the letters claimed "i done it for so-&-so who cout'n write." also phamb 1,4 (3s stad of 1s)

plond 3,992 wmologhcamev 'we submit our formal acknowledgement' +poxy 14,1626 pthead 8 also (that's p. jouguet's collection in cairo)

poxy 16,1881 wmocamev 'we put our solemn oath to this'

the hamb supra was hamburgensis, which yuou might not've recognized.

more for egpaya = egrapsa bgu 1,300 poxy 1,67

there're also lots of monographs on such legal documents, as those of C. B. Welles.

i'm quittin while i'm ahead. if i keep on, i'll get to liking this stuff and
won't have any time left at all to sail or to tell folks about the risen Jesus.

wasn't some of this material translated by those princeton semi-philologists whose work was edited by pharr for texas press, known as something like ancient roman statutes? reason i refer in such a snide way: i remember that the work that came to texas when i was there in the 50's looked like something some playboys had done. real scholars had to take so much time correcting, they might have worked it up from scratch and had their names on it.

don't believe all the stuff you read in thayer's translation of grimm and wilke or the arndt &c. translation of bauer.

shalom,
bearded bill of asheville
unca not having approved either whom or thereof.
********
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postscript: 
in some subtle ways bearded bill's writing reminds me of certain poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti or even lines from the Ezra Pound & R. Flemming translation of Electa.