TheDiddleyMan

My question is this:

Does anybody know why the NASB translates Matthew 28:2 in the past tense "And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for (1) an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away (2) the stone and sat upon it."?

All other translations I have seen translate in the present tense (e.g. the NIV: 1After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.
2There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it."

Actually, the above is not actually a present tense; I don't know the correct name for it. But it indicates present tense within the story: the women go to the tomb, an angel comes down. The NASB seems to indicate that the angel came down before the women came.

Other translations are more clear, including the NET bible which is produced by evangelicals (http://www.bible.org/netbible/):

28:1 Now after the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. 28:2 Suddenly there was a severe earthquake, for an angel of the Lord1 descending from heaven came and rolled away the stone and sat on it.


The NASB is the only Bible I have seen with the past tense. Does anybody know if there is any reason, other than harmonization, for this translation?

Thanks,
Kevin

jagkarma

Nobody else has stepped into this minefield, so I will toss out the first idea even if I haven't gotten very far with my koine. I learned (at least) that the relationships of the tenses in NT Greek are different from those in English. I would say that the difference you point out is a verb which is in the past tense in one translation, in the perfect tense in the other. Perfect in the sense that the action is complete in the past. These relations are a bit different in Greek, or in Latin, from the way that they stand in English. That might have introduced this dilemma. Another possibility is that translators might be taking a little liberty on the assumption that they are translating a translation, i.e. that Matthew is already a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic and the translators might be assuming they are correcting a pre-existent error. Try one of the on-line Greek interlinear Bibles. Another consideration is that the gospels aren't written in very good Greek, honest.

Al Kafirun

I know nothing of Koine Greek, so I'd like some clarification, too.

Mathetes

The text says: kai idou seismos egeneto megas. ("And behold, a big earthquake happened.")

Egeneto is aorist middle. Can't think a translation other than "happened". The aorist is the same tense that describes what the women were doing in the previous verse: hlqen Mariam... ("Mariam went...") Edited to add: at the end of the verse, apekulisen and ekaqhto ("rolled back" and "sat down") are aorist also.

If the writer wanted to give the impression that the action had been completed before the women went to the tomb, he would have used the perfect or the pluperfect. That would be the equivalent of the English pluperfect, "had happened".

I do not think the NASB translation has a case.

So true. Sometimes I marvel at how many times we try to derive theological theories out of a verb tense on a sentence in the NT, trying to find the minimal nuances of words in contemporary authors... Well, maybe the difficulty in interpretation does not come because the authors expressed complex theology, but just because they could not write proper Greek!

Matthew is not too bad, though.