"In recent years," Barr writes in the Preface, "I have come to believe that one of the greatest dangers to sound and adequate interpretation of the Bible comes from the prevailing use of procedure which, while claiming to rest upon a knowledge of the Israelite and Greek ways of thinking, constantly mishandles and distorts the linguistic evidence of the Hebrew and Greek languages as they are used in the Bible. The increasing sense of dependence upon the Bible in the modern church only makes this danger more serious. The fact that these procedures have never to my knowledge been collected, analysed, and criticized in detail was the chief stimulus to my undertaking of this task myself."