Translating historical presents
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Hi folks, Let's not get into translating every Greek present tense with an English present tense. We have to remember that grammatical tense-forms do not carry the same semantic value (meaning) across languages. If you look at some grammars you'll see that the Greek present tense is often used in narratives to describe past actions (perhaps adding a hint of vividness). The construction is sometimes called the "historic present." This is such a common use of the present tense in Greek that no-one would be confused and think the actions were taking place in the writer's present. So when we translate into English (which doesn't use the present tense this way in written literature) we have to use past-tense verbs in order to convey the sense of the Greek.
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