Is the Kingdom of God “within you,” “among you,” or “in your midst?”(Luke 17:21)
Prepositions are flexible—in Greek no less than in English. In both languages, context helps determine how they are best translated. Older Bibles are likely to say that “the kingdom of God is within you.” The Wycliffe Bible (1395), the Tyndale Bible (1530) Coverdale Bible (1535), Great Bible (1539), Geneva Bible (1560), Bishops’ Bible (1568), and Rheims New Testament (1582) all render the original word, “entos,” this way. So does the King James Version of 1611, playing ‘follow the leader.’
More modern translators note that this old rendering doesn’t make much sense. The context betrays it. Jesus was speaking to Pharisees. Throughout the New Testament, that bunch is antagonistic to him. If the kingdom of God was “within them,” they sure didn’t do a good job of finding it.
The King James Version was such an expressive work that no one touched for nearly 300 years, save for a renegade or two. Yet, says the preface to the Revised Standard Version, though English-speaking peoples owe it an “incalculable debt,” it has “grave defects.” This is through no fault of its own. It is just that its authors did not have access to much older manuscripts that were discovered after its date of publication. Nor did they have access to secular texts shedding light on just how koine Greek was used in Jesus’ time.
Says that RSV preface: “The King James Version of the Bible was based on a Greek text that was marred by mistakes, containing the accumulated errors of fourteen centuries of manuscript copying.” It sources few manuscripts earlier than the 10th century. Even when it has access to some, it barely uses them, sticking with the rendering of the familiar but more unreliable earlier works cited above.
With benefit of updated scholarship, many current translations lean towards “the kingdom of God is among you” (CEB, AMP, or ISV) or “the kingdom of God is in your midst.” (ESV, NIV, NASB, NET)
By no means is it just the New World Translation that says “in your midst.” Many do. In fact, a tally of Bibles old and new, from a few parallel sites, primarily Biblegateway.com, shows “within you” occurs 33 times. That is the majority, but not when compared to the sum of “among you” 20 times, and “in your midst” 18 times: 38 times. The latter two mean essentiallly the same thing: that Jesus was “among them” or “in their midst” through his personal presence and what it stood for. In short, the king designate of that kingdom was the one addressing them.
So why do so many who identify as Christians today claim the “kingdom of God is within you,” when it is based on outdated scholarship? “Among you” or “in your midst” is what flies today.
****** The bookstore
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