The land promise in the NT?

Christian scholars have routinely said that Jesus universalized the particular—transferring the promise of a land for the Jews from the OT to a promise of the whole world to his followers.  This is best put, it is often said, in Matt 5:5: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

I believed this for several decades after I became a serious reader of the Greek NT in my twenties.  But then several decades ago I realized that a veil had been cast over my eyes, closing them to evidence of the land promise all over the NT.  Thomas Kuhn showed in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1961) that at the beginning of every scientific revolution (think of Galileo, Newton, Einstein) elite scientists had evidence for the new theory right in front of their eyes.  But they could not see the evidence because the existing scientific paradigm had cast a veil over their eyes.  They could not see the new evidence.

I realized this might have happened to biblical scholars and theologians for centuries.  They were not able to see the land promise in the NT because they had been trained not to see it.

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