Ever since the ‘rediscovery’ in the late nineteenth century of the significance of eschatology for Jesus and the early Christian movement, the problem of the delay of the parousia has intrigued scholars. If the eschatological expectations of the early church were disappointed, the magnitude of the disappointment and the form in which it was expressed do not seem to fit with our own expectations. Although there are indications within the New Testament canon that Christian communities did grapple with a disappointment in expectation, nowhere are there echoes of the sort of crisis that we of the late second millennium would have expected. It seems that our models for understanding the changes in early Christian eschatological expectation have not yet been adequate to the task of accounting for what is in fact reflected in the documents themselves.