20.138 Aorist Passive Participles

Make sure you read Croy's notes on the aorist passive participle in section 138.

As you would expect, the aorist passive participle is formed from the aorist passive past tense verb (the sixth principal part of the Greek verb). In the present system, the middle and active forms are identical, but in the aorist system, the middle and passive forms are distinct. That means there is an aorist middle participle form (which you learned in the previous lesson), and a distinctly different aorist passive participle form which is what you will learn in this lesson.

Also as you would expect, the participle does not have augment! So you have to remove the past tense augment from the aorist passive past tense verb in order to generate the participle. You will find a chart at the bottom of this page to help you identify the unaugmented aorist passive stem needed to form the participle.

The difference between the present passive participle and the aorist passive participle is simply a difference of aspect, rather than a difference in tense (participles have no tense). As a result, there is no way to distinguish between the present passive participle and aorist passive participle in English translation:

σῳζόμενος (present passive participle): "saved"

σωθείς (aorist passive participle): "saved"

The difference between the present passive participle and the aorist passive participle is a difference of aspect. The aorist passive participle denotes the verbal action, while the present passive participle calls attention to the unfolding of that action. There is no easy way to reflect this difference in the English translation. The best thing you can do is to read lots of Greek (lots and lots and lots of Greek), and pay very close attention to how the authors choose whether to use the present aspect (unfolding action) or the aorist aspect (the action itself, with no emphasis on the action unfolding). You might want to take a look one more time at these notes about aspect in the Greek verb since every time you see a participle there is an element of aspect (present or aorist) in the meaning of that participle.

As you saw with the present and aorist active participles, the aorist passive participle follows first declension endings for the feminine forms, and third declension endings for the masculine and neuter forms. As in the aorist active participles, the aorist passive participles are always accented on the ending, not on the stem.

Notice that in the feminine singular plural, the participle is more like a noun than an adjective, because it takes the special accented omega ending that you expect in feminine nouns but not in feminine adjectives:

Chart of Aorist Passive Participle Forms