7 Narrative Structure and Verbal Aspect Choice in Luke The aorist presents “an event whose completion constitutes the es- sence of the speaker’s experience”13. It “presents an event as relevant with respect to a given vantage point (usually, but not necessarily, a speaker’s “now”)”14. The aorist, thus, represents actions as “near” to the speaker, whatever his location in the absolute time of his statement. Bakker ef- fectively demonstrates, through numerous examples drawn from several authors’ works of differing genres, that the aorist can refer to events that are past, present, or future with respect to the moment of speaking. The critical criterion is that the event described is viewed as a completed whole by the consciousness that is perceiving the action. Bakker thus defines the aorist as, strictly speaking, not a tense at all. It indicates “nearness” in the narrative or relevance to a given vantage point, rather than time, as traditionally defined tense does. Now let us turn back to Bakker’s two modes of discourse. The first mode –the “discourse of the knower”– Bakker calls the diegetic mode, after Plato’s terminology for the presence of the narrator in poetry. Broadly stated, this mode of discourse, as it depicts historical material, presents the events of the narrative in an overtly mediated manner with the historian present “in the role of annalist or evaluator”15. This mode is roughly equivalent to the previously mentioned foregrounding/back- grounding system of discourse16. Bakker argues that in this mode the speaker records foreground information –the historical, factual, and usually sequential acts of the narrative– in the aorist tense and records background information –the circumstances and acts that are not pre- cisely actual events of the narrative but the conditions that accompany them– in the imperfect tense. Indeed, this distinction holds true even in cases where there appears to be foreground material or narrative events given in the imperfect, so long as the events described by the imperfect are not fully part of the “historical record”. This is often the case where an event is referred to that has yet to occur within the view of the current 13 Bakker, Verbal Aspect, 26. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 28. The historian’s presence in this mode of discourse is sometimes made more obvious by the use of formulaic passages that indicate the narratorial perspective in the presentation of the discourse. Bakker’s example of this is the 33 various instances of Thucydides’s formula, “And that winter ended, and thereby the third year ended in the war which Thucydides has described”, (Ibid., 29-30, quoting Thucydides 2,103,2). Such for- mulaic passages draw attention to the narrative as a construction and the narrative act as a performance, with, in this example, the performer (Thucydides) overtly present by name. 16 For the theoretical basis of this paradigm, see P.J. Hopper, “Aspect and Foreground- ing in Discourse”, Syntax and Semantics 12 (New York 1979) 231-41.