Luke’s Gospel plays a significant role in transmitting the majority of the kingdom of God sayings directly associated with Jesus. Karl C. H. Leung offers a new explanation of the semantics of the phrase from a cognitive model of polysemy and provides alternative interpretations of the kingdom teachings in Luke’s Gospel as a whole. Leung departs from the more common twentieth-century interpretation of an inaugurated eschatology in which God’s reign has arrived and will be consummated at the end of the age. Instead, he demonstrates that Jesus’s teaching on the kingdom of God exhibits the notions of gathering the eschatological Israel, restoring the ownership of the promised land to the chosen people of God, and attaining the continual expansion of God’s new world on earth in the eschatological age.

Karl C. H. Leung is Director of Training at Doulos Theological Seminary in Hong Kong. He holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham.