80 Paul Himes amount of time (‘performance’) or not (‘punctual’) to perform this act”36. Thus each verb has a natural form (whether perfective or imperfective), yet “the author may choose a non-default form in order to communicate some nuance”37. Nevertheless Baugh still maintains that the present imperative deals with a “general precept” while the aorist concerns “an action or state on a specific occasion”38. In summary, the issue with imperatives, like indicatives, seems to be whether or not the aorist urges a single action or simply just an action (regardless of whether it is punctiliar, continuous, etc.). With prohibitions, the issue seems to be whether or not the aorist urges one not to begin an action while the present urges the cessation of an action, or whether or not both tenses can be used to prohibit both ongoing and future actions (with the emphasis on the durative nature of the present). Those holding to verbal aspect theory a là Porter, would naturally view aktionsart as mostly irrelevant to the use of tenses. A survey of the aorist imperatives in the Pastoral Epistles will hopefully shed some light on the issue. 36 S. M. Baugh, “Introduction to Greek Tense Form Choice in the Non-Indicative Moods” [cited 15 March 2010]. Online: http://www.wscal.edu/baugh/PDF/ALL/GreekTenseForm- Choice_Baugh.pdf, 10 (if the reader has difficulty accessing this link, please try http:// baugh.wscal.edu/index5.php and then scroll down to find the file entitled “Greek Tense Form Choice”). For Baugh, a stative atelic form would be “I am alive” while an atelic activ- ity would be “I am walking” (no terminus implied). In contrast, a telic performance would be “I open” and a telic punctual verb would be “I buy”; for both of the telic verbs, a terminus is implied (11). 37 Ibid., 36. 38 Ibid., 40-41, though on 42 Baugh cautions against “an overly simplistic description of the present imperative as denoting constant action and the aorist as one-time action” (42). The reader should note that on pages 38-39, Baugh presents an impressive and mostly convincing array of statistics demonstrating how certain verbs naturally prefer the present tense while others naturally prefer the aorist. Yet elsewhere Baugh’s argument is signifi- cantly less convincing. On page 12, he argues that “the atelic/telic character of a particular lexeme is quite often more complex than first meets the eye, and we must be open to the possibility that sometimes the inherent nature of events may have been perceived differently by different Greek speakers or writers.” On 12 n34, he discusses how he initially thought that φεύγω would be considered an atelic verb, but that the propensity of its aorist forms in the NT and LXX convinced him that it should be considered as telic. This, however, sounds too much like special pleading; if Baugh is simply allowed to swap his preconceived notions of telic vs. atelic when the evidence calls for it, then his position is non-falsifiable and impossible to demonstrate scientifically. Nevertheless, to be fair, this represents one minor complaint in an otherwise interesting and unique article. Without a doubt, Baugh’s position deserves more scrutiny and may yet prove to be more accurate than other discussions of the verb tenses.