Mathew 24:14
This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.
Jesus commanded his disciples to preach the gospel of the Kingdom (Mathew 4:17, 16:27-28) into “the whole world” and then the “end” could come. Many have wrongly interpreted the word “world” to mean “the entire known world/earth” of today (2018). This is at the most, careless exegesis. The Greek word translated as “world” in Mathew 24:14 is “oikoumene” and depending on the context can mean “the inhabited earth, a portion of the inhabited earth, the Roman empire, the inhabitants of the earth, the world”.
The following chart demonstrates that the word “world” as used in the New Testament texts below, do not and cannot refer to “the entirety of the world/globe” today, in 2018.
As the chart demonstrates, the Greek word “oikoumene” translated as “world” in all the above texts does not and cannot refer to the known world of our day, that is, the entire globe of 2018. As should be obvious, “the world” in each of these texts refers to the “Roman world” of those days. The same is true of the word “world” in Mathew 24:14. Combine this evidence with the fact that Jesus himself placed the fulfillment of the great commission in the lifetime of his first century disciples (Mathew 24:34), and we have definitive proof that the great commission was limited to the “known and inhabited Roman world” of the first century, and was fulfilled prior to the end of the Old Covenant age in AD70 (Mathew 24:3,14,34).