The Kingdom is within you? Not according to Luke

Here’s another excellent post by friend and colleague Larry Hurtado. See what you think.
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The Kingdom of God is “Within your reach”
by larryhurtado
It’s amazing how slowly the work of papyrologists influences the work of other scholars. Here’s an example. In Luke 17:20-21, Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God will come, and Jesus responds exhorting that it doesn’t come “with observation” (a term used also for medical observation of symptoms) and by pointing “here or there,” for the kingdom of God is ἐντὸς ὑμῶν (“entos humon”).

The plural form of the pronoun (“humon”) is commonly recognized as calling into question the translation of the phrase in the KJV, “the kingdom of God is within you” (as if in some sort of mystical sense.) So, commentaries now typically prefer something like, “the kingdom of God is among you” or “in your midst”.

But 70 years ago, C. H. Roberts pointed out that the expression (and variations of it) in papyri roughly contemporary with the NT writings more reasonably meant that something or someone was “within reach,” or “to hand.” (C.H. Roberts, “The Kingdom of Heaven,” Harvard Theological Review 41, 1948, pp. 1-8). So, the phrase should probably be rendered: “the kingdom of God is within your reach,” or “near to hand.” (As commentators commonly observe, the statement here probably alludes to Jesus’ ministry as the vehicle of the kingdom of God.)

Commentators can be forgiven, I suppose, because even the important resource, the Bauer/Arndt/Gingrich/Danker lexicon of the NT and early Christian literature, buries the reference to Roberts’ article and its results well down into the entry for ἐντός.

(The phrasing of the statement in The Gospel of Thomas (logion 3), “the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you,” reflects the emphasis on interiority in this esoteric-leaning writing.)