Our discussion is unusually easy to introduce. Its subject is crucial, its previous treatments, astonishingly few. A paradox, this, which could be both a joy and a despair to the doctoral student. The celebrated eastern narrative of Lk 24 is the crossroads of the two-volume opus of St. Luke, as the reader can tell when he finds it being repeated, in condensed and slightly varied form, at the beginning of the second volume. The function of such an axis composition must be to demonstrate the concerns that are common to the two books, and to show how such concerns are to be pursued from the first book, which this story terminates, to the second, which it inaugurates. Indeed, Eastern is the point of connection between the ministry of Jesus and the mission of his followers; and these are the two topics, respectively, of the gospel of Luke - where his is one voice among four in the New Testament - and the Acts of the Apostles, where his testimony practically stands alone. The unique situation of one gospel among several, extended into a book altogether unique in the canon, has made the gospel into what one of its foremost students has called the practice-field of redaction-criticism. Is it possible that, in such well-quarried terrain, anything could be left to say about the composition that holds that key position at the nuclear center? But precisely here the dearth of concerted study defies explanation.