Endings in literary works are critical, an author's conclusion -- to a story or an argument -- is intended to shape our understanding of the whole in one particular way or another. In this engaging and deceptively simple study, Morna D. Hooker explores the final pages of each of the four Gospels and the Book of Acts, and attempts to uncover the specific messages that the Evangelists hoped to convey to their readers. Almost all of the Old Testament books have conclusions that look forward to what is going to happen next -- what, then, is the significance of the way in which these New Testament documents end? A companion volume to her much-praised Beginnings, this new study began as a valedictory lecture given in the University of Cambridge to mark her retirement as Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity, and was expanded to form the Chuen King Lectures given in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2001. Book jacket.