The Verb — tense, voice and mood
Five things at once
Lesson two was about nouns — the article and the five cases. This one is about the other half of the sentence. A Greek verb carries five pieces of information in a single word: person and number (who is doing it), tense, voice and mood. English needs helpers for most of that — will have been, might be, let him — where Greek changes the word. About one Greek word in five on this site is a verb, and the panel names all five pieces every time you tap one.
Tense is about shape, not time
The first thing to unlearn: Greek tense is mostly about the shape of an action, not when it happened. Two tenses carry almost everything, in a near-exact split — the present, which views an action as going on, and the aorist, which views it as a single whole. The aorist is not "the past tense". It is the tense that declines to comment on duration: it puts the action down on the page complete, like a dot. John 11:35 is one word, ἐδάκρυσεν, edakrusen, aorist — Jesus wept. Not was weeping, not used to weep. It happened.
The perfect, which English keeps losing
Then the tense worth the whole lesson. The Greek perfect describes a past action whose result still stands — done, and still true. Mark 1:15 opens πεπλήρωται, peplērōtai, perfect: not "the time was fulfilled" but "the time has been fulfilled and stands fulfilled". Ephesians 2:8 has σεσῳσμένοι, sesōsmenoi, a perfect participle — "you are people who have been saved and remain so". Both are usually flattened in English into a plain past, and both times something is lost that the Greek says plainly. It is not a common tense — about one verb in twenty — which is part of why it lands where it does.
Voice, and the one English does not have
Active, and passive, as in English: he loosed, he was loosed. Greek adds a third, the middle: he loosed for himself, with the subject somehow inside the action. About three verbs in four here are active and one in nine passive. Then an oddity the panel will show you and no translation can: deponent verbs, which wear middle or passive endings but mean something active. John 1:14 has ἐθεασάμεθα, etheasametha — middle in form, and it simply means "we beheld". When the panel says "middle deponent", it is telling you the form and the meaning disagree, and that this is normal.
Mood: five ways to mean it
The indicative states — it is over half of all verbs. The imperative commands. The subjunctive holds something open: may, might, in order that. The infinitive is the bare to-do. And the participle, which in Greek is a verb behaving like an adjective, is one verb in four — a proportion that surprises most beginners and explains why Greek sentences run so long without full stops. Then the optative, the rarest: a wish, and fewer than seventy of them in the whole New Testament.
John 3:16 as a grammar table
The verse everyone knows carries five different verb forms. ἠγάπησεν, ēgapēsen — aorist active indicative: God loved, put down whole. ἔδωκεν, edōken — aorist again: he gave. πιστεύων, pisteuōn — present active participle: the one who is believing, going on believing. ἀπόληται, apolētai — aorist subjunctive: may not perish, held open. ἔχῃ, echē — present subjunctive: may go on having. The believing and the having are ongoing; the loving and the giving are done. That contrast is in the endings, and it is there in the Greek whether or not an English version can keep it.
Two prayers, and the moods behind them
Matthew 6:10 asks γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου — genēthētō, a third-person imperative, a form English has to paraphrase as "let your will be done" because we cannot command someone who is not present. Luke 1:38 answers it in the rarest mood in the book: γένοιτό μοι, genoito moi, aorist optative — "let it be to me according to your word". A command in one place, a wish in the other, and the Vulgate renders both with the same Latin word. The Latin course takes that up in its own third lesson.
Why it matters on this site
The panel has always printed the whole parsing — "verb · aorist · active · indicative · third person singular" — and until this lesson most of those words were unexplained. They are the difference between a promise and a report, between a thing done and a thing still going on. The standing questions this site argues, including which Greek text the Lantern Direct will translate when it reaches the New Testament, are decided in exactly this kind of detail.