How should we represent an active aorist participle in the English language?

Note : This is a question about the absence of the aorist tense in the English language and the complication of rendering, accurately, the correct tense when translating from other languages.

It is not a question about the Greek (or any other) language.

I have noticed translators having difficulty in representing an active aorist participle in English and I am pondering how it should be done, correctly.

In 1 John 5:6 the Koine Greek phrase outos estin o elthon (ουτος εστιν ο ελθων) contains the active aorist participle, elthon (ελθων) and various attempts have been made to accurately represent this in English, preserving the precise meaning.

• The Authorised King James version, the J N Darby version and the Englishman's Greek New Testament (interlinear, literal) all give the rendering 'this is he that came'.

• Robert Young, who strove after exactitude at the expense of readability, has 'this one is he who did come'.

All of these four are using a simple past tense, not expressing a single act which still pertains now, and none of them expresses the verbal activity of a participle.

The recent John Metcalfe version gives us 'this is the one coming' which clearly wants us to have a participle, of sorts ; but, to me, that has a future meaning (unless that is a matter of my own local idiomaticy).

My own attempt also gives a participle but attempts to represent the active aorist meaning with the word 'once' - 'this is he [once] coming'.

I am still not clear as to how we can, in English , express an active aorist participle and accurately convey both the verbal activity of the participle but also the concept of a once-completed action.

An author's or speaker's choice of the aorist form for a participle as opposed to the present form (to be studied later), is not a decision about time, but one about aspect. The choice of aorist over present portrays the action indicated by the participle as complete, not in progress.

In practice, this often correlates with contexts where one action (the one portrayed by the participle) occurs before another (the one portrayed by the main verb), but that sequence is implied, not encoded in the meaning of the aorist form.

Greek Aorist

There is little chance of giving an accurate rendering of the Greek aorist solely through English verb forms. In the given example, one could indeed use "he is come," which does convey both the travel and the current and continuing presence. However, this construction has become uncommon in 21st century English, whereas aorist is common throughout classical Greek literature, so that the English translation takes on a hieratic flavor that is entirely absent in the Greek original.