ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the cue from Acts and takes the same themes in two stages. The first is entitled: The History of Interpretation of the Kingdom of God and what we could learn from it. The second is similar: The Growth of the Earliest Christian Communities and what we can learn from them. So the chapter contains a little bit of the history of interpretation, some reflections on early church life and some unsubtly laid trails to today's church. The modern era of discussion of what the New Testament (NT), and Jesus in particular, meant by the kingdom of God began at the end of the nineteenth century when Johannes Weiss published his book Jesus Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. The history of subsequent scholarly discussion of the kingdom can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with the different insights of Weiss and Schweitzer on the one hand and Dodd on the other.
