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Prior translators of the Bible have tended to level out Koine Greek verb forms as a way, by their lights, of making Scripture more understandable. Since everything recorded in the Bible happened in the past, nearly everything we read there should be stated in the past tense. The Bible as history.
But that's not necessarily the way it was actually written. There is in Biblical Greek a grammatical tense, neither exactly past nor present, called the aorist for which there's no exact equivalent in English, but which as Pakaluk explains may, if translated properly, give immediacy to the events described. In Greek one "sees" a present action taking place in the past that, if translated as past tense, can seem lifeless. Pakaluk gives a humorous, non-Biblical example of the aorist in action:

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"So I left my driveway. And I turn the corner. And what do I see? I see a man with a pig. And I thought, that was strange. So I stopped and I asked him. . ." Someone speaking from memory in this way will change tenses to keep the hearer's attention, but mainly because, as he is speaking "from memory," he finds it easy to revert to the viewpoint of "what it was like to be there."

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The effect of this in his translation of Mark is electrifying, and two things came to mind as I read: St. Benedict's admonition at the start of his Rule to "listen with the ear of your heart;" and a professor of Shakespeare I had in college who urged me to "see the plays in the theater of your mind."

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