Greek: ὅτε οὖν ἔλαβεν τὸ ὄξος ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν Τετέλεσται, καὶ κλίνας τὴν κεφαλὴν παρέδωκεν τὸ πνεῦμα.
Translators tend to render Τετέλεσται with "it is finished": this verb is the perfect passive form of τελέω. Merkle poses these questions concerning Jesus' words: "Is Jesus looking back over his life and making a claim about how he has fulfilled all that was prophesied about him? Or is Jesus looking ahead to the present blessings that would come as a result of his death and resurrection?"
I would add, does the perfect form of the verb used in John 19:30 shed any light on these queries?
The perfect tense-form depicts completed action and the present result of the action: Merkle reminds us that the perfect's verbal aspect is stative--signifying a state of affairs brought about by an action completed in the past. However, Richard A. Young maintains:
"The perfect is normally interpreted as expressing a completed act with continuing results. There are problems with this definition if time is not a function of form, for completed acts are always past. Contextually the perfect may refer to something past (Matt. 19:8), present (Matt. 27:43), possibly future (Matt. 20:23; John 5:24; Jas. 5:2-3), omnitemporal (Rom. 7:2), or timeless (John 3:18). It seems better to view the perfect and pluperfect as members of the stative aspect in which the speaker conceives the verbal idea as a condition or state of affairs" (Intermediate NT Greek, p. 126).So Young takes a position that mirrors Stanley Porter: he wants to construe Greek verbs as timeless in se at least to some extent, but he reckons that Greek verbs get their temporality from the context of usage (usus loquendi). This is a controversial point that does not need to be nor probably will be settled anytime soon and the point won't detain us here. For further references, see https://fosterheologicalreflections.blogspot.com/2023/07/benjamin-merkles-exegetical-gems_8.html
Getting back to Merkle's analysis, he encourages one reading Greek to focus on whether the perfect (in context) is making the action or the state of affairs it's depicting more prominent. It will usually be one or the other.
Like other tense-forms, Greek writers/speakers employ the perfect in various ways: consummative, intensive, dramatic, gnomic, etc. As for the pluperfect, it depicts: "a past state that was caused by a previous action." In other words, writers use the pluperfect to describe an event that preceded another occurrence (normally described with the aorist). Merkle's example is Matthew 7:25: καὶ κατέβη ἡ βροχὴ καὶ ἦλθαν οἱ ποταμοὶ καὶ ἔπνευσαν οἱ ἄνεμοι καὶ προσέπεσαν τῇ οἰκίᾳ ἐκείνῃ, καὶ οὐκ ἔπεσεν, τεθεμελίωτο γὰρ ἐπὶ τὴν πέτραν.
The verbs in the text are aorists while the verb τεθεμελίωτο is pluperfect. What is the significance of the pluperfect here?
"The aspectual significance of the pluperfect emphasizes the resulting (past) state of a previous action or event. The pluperfect is not common, occurring only eighty-six times in the NT, and is found only in the indicative."
What about John 19:30? What can we possibly glean from the perfect form occurring there?
The two options Merkle lays out for Τετέλεσται are that it could be a consummative perfect or an intensive perfect. In other words, when Jesus uttered the word, was he looking backwards at the action/actions that brought about his current state or was he emphasizing the current state brought about by past action/actions? Merkle chooses the first option (the consummative perfect). He gives four reasons why, but he concedes that Τετέλεσται might be emphasizing the current state, that is, be an intensive perfect.
The footnotes in this chapter contain useful information and Merkle concludes with a quote:
“This one Greek word is the final statement of God, declaring that everything he wanted to accomplish has been completed to perfection in the person and work of his Son” (Klink, John, 811).
Edward W. Klink III thinks: “The nature of the completed action is magnified by the verb’s perfect tense, which describes a past action with continuingly present-tense force.” John, ZECNT (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 811.
This quote is taken from one of Merkle's notes.
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