3 NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND VERBAL ASPECT CHOICE IN LUKE ALEXANDER C. LONEY In order to represent the actions of past-time narrative, Luke can choose to employ either the aorist or the imperfect tense, that is, either the perfec- tive or the imperfective aspect. By selecting one tense over the other Luke manipulates verbal aspect to give organization to his episodic narrative and to create contrastive prominence (enargeia) within individual pericopes. In this way, he follows in the tradition of his historiographical predecessors –most notably Thucydides– who, through their subtle play with verbal as- pect, composed narratives concerned with at once the factual representation of the past and their own contemporary, didactic purposes. The primary concern of this study is to explore the possible grounds for choice of verbal aspect and the attendant semantics that this choice represents in the Lukan narratives. A complete treatment of this subject is well beyond the scope of this essay. Others have attempted similar projects at the book-length scale, though not to my knowledge on Luke1. The more modest aim of this study is to seek to answer why Luke, in order to represent the actions of past-time narrative, chooses to employ one tense over the other between the aorist and imperfect – two catego- ries of tense whose primary distinction lies in verbal aspect, the former being perfective in aspect and the latter imperfective2. The answer to this question has implications foremost in the evaluation of Luke’s composi- tional methodology. As this essay will primarily argue, Luke manipulates verbal aspect to give organization to his episodic narrative and to create contrastive prominence within individual pericopes3. Secondarily, in cer- 1 E.g., R. Decker, Temporal Deixis of the Greek Verb in the Gospel of Mark with Refer- ence to Verbal Aspect (New York 2001). 2 See n. 21 for further discussion on the reasons for the selection of these two tenses in this study. 3 This is not to say that organization and discourse prominence are mutually exclusive features; they often work in tandem, reinforcing one another. For a structural/organizational analysis of Letter of Jude via discourse prominence and verbal tense-forms, see J.T. Reed – R.A. Reese, “Verbal Aspect, Discourse Prominence, and the Letter of Jude”, FilNeot 9 (1996) 181-99, especially 190, 98-99; they employ a methodology similar to that of this study. Filología Neotestamentaria - Vol. XVIII - 2005, pp. 3-31 Facultad de Filosofía y Letras - Universidad de Córdoba (España)