Our chief concern in this chapter is to discover how far Luke betrays his own views in his portrayal of Jesus' eschatology. Frequent reference will be made to H. Conzelmann, since his is the view which is most influential and widely held today. Since the advent of his book The Theology of St Luke it has become a byword of New Testament studies that Luke is a man with a theological axe to grind. He is pictured as one who has systematically manipulated and recast his sources down to the smallest detail, in order to squeeze them into his overall theological framework. A brief outline of Conzelmann's view will suffice at this stage: Jesus and the early Christians expected the Parousia to occur very soon, at least within their lifetimes. This hope was disappointed and it led to a series of crises. By the time Luke came to write, stop-gap answers had worn thin; it was no longer sufficient to postpone the date of the End bit by bit; a final, lasting solution was needed. This Luke provides. He consistently eradicates expectation of an imminent End from his texts; in its place he propounds a theory of Heilsgeschichte in which the Parousia loses its dominant position by being relegated to the far-distant and indefinite future. This Heilsgeschichte is divided into three distinct epochs: the first is the Old Testament epoch, up to and including John the Baptist; the second is the period of Jesus' earthly ministry, characterised in the German title of Conzelmann's book as ‘The Middle of Time’; the third epoch is that of the Church.