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And Jesus *said to him, “See that you tell no one; but go, show yourself to the priest and present the [a]offering that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” Matthew 8:4 NASB 1995
*said – You know that Hebrew and Greek do not have punctuation. That means authors have to find other ways of expressing surprise, emphasis, questions, pauses, and all the other things we do with !, “ “, ?, and –. When we find Jewish authors writing in Greek, we shouldn’t be surprised that the grammatical devices for punctuation in Hebrew migrate into Greek. One of those devices is called the “historical present.” “ . . . in some contexts the present tense seems more unexpected and unjustified to English than a past tense would have been. But Greek authors frequently used the present tense for the sake of heightened vividness, thereby transporting their readers in imagination to the actual scene at the time of occurrence.”[1] The NASB recognizes this device and indicates it with an asterisk. You can see it employed in this verse in Matthew’s gospel. The Greek literally reads, “And Iēsoús saying to him, . . .” even though the event is reported as a past occurrence. Matthew wants the reader to imagine being there, hearing Yeshua speaking these words. So he uses this grammatical oddity in giving the reader a clue about what really matters. Of course, if we didn’t have the asterisk we would simply assume that the whole event is recorded as something that already happened—and we would go on to the next verse without giving it any more thought. But Matthew wants us to pause—and think about what is really happening here as if we were witnessing it in person.
Matthew doesn’t do this every time Yeshua speaks. In fact, in that great collection of teachings called “the sermon on the mount,” we don’t find the historical present. We probably think that we should. After all, if there is any event where an author would want us to imagine we were in the crowd, the teaching given on the hillside would be it. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, Matthew uses the historical present in this rather off-hand story about a man who is healed. What’s even stranger is that the previous verse also includes words from Yeshua, and they are not recorded in the historical present. But just three verses later, we find it again when Yeshua speaks to the centurion, “And he *said to him, ‘I will come and heal him’” (8:7). Why is Matthew selective? What is it about these verses, but not others, that elicit his use of a grammatical oddity?
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”[2]
Topical Index: historical present, Matthew 8:4
[1] “Notes on the Translation of Greek Tenses,” in New American Standard Bible (Moody Press, 1963).
[2] L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, cited in Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 138.
