The Development of the Canon of the New Testament

Preaching of Peter [Kerygma Petri] (Egypt, early 2nd century CE)

The Preaching of Peter (Kerygma Petri or simply KP) survives today only in fragments as quotations from Clement and Origen. Clement quotes from it approvingly, but Origen does not. The small amount of extant text makes it almost impossible to voice any conjectures about the structure of this work. One can probably demonstrate a connection in terms of content between individual fragments, but a coherent text cannot be reconstructed out of this. It is also scarcely possible to show the original sequence of the fragments.

The KP is to be understood as a combination of ideas which occur in the New Testament (e.g. I Thess. 1:9f, Rom. 1:18ff; Acts 17) with elements which derive from Jewish apologetic. The significance of the KP seems to lie in the fact that here we have a middle term in the preaching tradition between the early Christian missionary preaching, which has left traces for example in Acts, and the Greek apologetic. It is the more regrettable that so few fragments of this important document have survived.