In 1936 C. H. Dodd wrote his famous book on the preaching of the apostolic church. In it he argued that there was a definite pattern to the preaching of the apostles, which he sought to explain in terms of the kerygma. Dodd's book was widely acclaimed and exercised an immense influence on New Testament scholarship. However, it had the unfortunate effect of magnifying the term kerygma at the expense of other equally important words which the New Testament uses to describe the Christian message. It is this danger to which E. G. Selwyn points in the Festschrift for C. H. Dodd:

I sometimes wonder whether the term Kfipuyjjioc has not been worked too hard, and whether the word nocpTUpfcc and its cognates would not better describe the primitive and indispensable core of the Christian message. At any rate, if we examine the comparative occurrences in the New Testament of the two sets of terms, we find that the occurrences of the verbs alone which speak of ‘witness considerably outnumber the occurrences of Knpuaasiv, while the occurrences of the noun nccpTvpioc outnumber those of the noun Kripuyjia by more than six to one. There is nothing here which will make C. H. Dodd's The Apostolic Preaching andIts Developments less important than it was when it first appeared. But there is room for another monograph on the Apostolic testimony.

In fact, F. L. Fisher thinks that ca thorough study of witnessing would necessitate a study of the whole Bible'. The present work is an attempt to fill this need.

To begin this study, however, is to confront a fundamental difference in scholarly opinion about the development and use of the idea of witness in the New Testament.