In our discussion of Un-Reformed history here last week, I quoted from the third chapter of Romans. In order not to distract from the focus of that post, I stuck with the language used in most of our English translations: “There is no one righteous.”
That word “righteous” is an odd quirk of our English-language translations of the Bible. Nearly every other translation of the Greek in this verse translates that word as “just” — starting with St. Jerome’s Latin translation (“Quia non est justus“), That’s also how this Greek word dikaios is translated — “just” — in almost every other English translation of every other Greek text from the time of the New Testament.
This is an English-language New Testament oddity. The Greek says “justice.” Translations of the Greek into almost every other language read the equivalent of “justice” in each of those languages. But in our English translations that word is curiously rendered, instead, as “righteousness.”
The great Reformed theologian Nick Wolterstorff (still with us at 93) writes about this strange quirk of our English-language translations in his 2008 book Justice: Rights and Wrongs:
Those who approach the New Testament solely through English translations face a serious linguistic obstacle to apprehending what these writings say about justice. In most English translations, the word “justice” occurs relatively infrequently. It is no surprise, then, that most English-speaking people think the New Testament does not say much about justice; the Bibles they read do not say much about justice. English translations are in this way different from translations into Latin, French, Spanish, German, Dutch — and for all I know, most languages.
The basic issue is well known among translators and commentators. Plato’s Republic, as we all know, is about justice. The Greek noun in Plato’s text that is standardly translated as “justice” is “dikaiosune;” the adjective standardly translated as “just” is “dikaios.” This same dik-stem occurs around three hundred times in the New Testament, in a wide variety of grammatical variants.
To the person who comes to English translations of the New Testament fresh from reading and translating classical Greek, it comes as a surprise to discover that though some of those occurrences are translated with grammatical variants on our word “just,” the great bulk of dik-stem words are translated with grammatical variants on our word “right.” The noun, for example, is usually translated as “righteousness,” not as “justice.” In English, we have the word “just” and its grammatical variants coming from the Latin iustitia, and the word “right” and its grammatical variants coming from the Old English recht. Almost all our translators have decided to translate the great bulk of dik-stem words in the New Testament with grammatical variants on the latter — just the opposite of the decision made by most translators of classical Greek.
I will give just two examples of the point. The fourth of the beatitudes of Jesus, as recorded in the fifth chapter of Matthew, reads, in the New Revised Standard Version, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” The word translated as “righteousness” is “dikaiosune.” And the eighth beatitude, in the same translation, reads “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The Greek word translated as “righteousness” is “dikaiosune.” Apparently, the translators were not struck by the oddity of someone being persecuted because he is righteous. My own reading of human affairs is that righteous people are either admired or ignored, not persecuted; people who pursue justice are the ones who get in trouble.
It goes almost without saying that the meaning and connotations of “righteousness” are very different in present-day idiomatic English from those of “justice.” “Righteousness” names primarily if not exclusively a certain trait of personal character. … The word in present-day idiomatic English carries a negative connotation. In everyday speech one seldom any more describes someone as righteous; if one does, the suggestion is that he is self-righteous. “Justice,” by contrast, refers to an interpersonal situation; justice is present when persons are related to each other in a certain way.
… When one takes in hand a list of all the occurrences of dik-stem words in the Greek New Testament, and then opens up almost any English translation of the New Testament and reads in one sitting all the translations of these words, a certain pattern emerges: unless the notion of legal judgment is so prominent in the context as virtually to force a translation in terms of justice, the translators will prefer to speak of righteousness.
Why are they so reluctant to have the New Testament writers speak of primary justice? Why do they prefer that the gospel of Jesus Christ be the good news of the righteousness of God rather than the good news of the justice of God? Why do they prefer that Jesus call his followers to righteousness rather than to justice? I do not know; I will have to leave it to others to answer that question.
The answer to that question, I think, is slavery. I think that’s what Wolterstorff thinks too and that his questions there in that last paragraph are a droll “Oh, you know the ones”/”Raise your hand if you can guess why” nod to the elephant in the room.
Elsewhere, Wolterstorff discusses how this misstep in our English New Testaments may have originated as a result of early English translations relying on texts translated into and back out of German — an accident of history. But he recognizes it was a convenient accident for those requiring a form of faith and gospel that avoided talk of justice.
The verse we quoted here the other day, Romans 3:10, is an interesting example of this odd feature of our English Bibles for a couple of reasons. That verse starts with “As it is written,” and the bit we quoted — “There is no one righteous, not even one” — is itself a quote from the Psalms.* The Psalms were written in Hebrew, not Greek, and our English translations of the Hebrew scriptures tend to be more precise and accurate in distinguishing between the different Hebrew words for “justice” and “righteousness.” (But then, also, Romans 3 might not be quoting directly from the Hebrew scriptures, but from the Greek translation of them — this stuff gets complicated.)
Both of those words — “justice” and “righteousness” — appear regularly in our English translations of the Psalms. In that book, they often seem to be presented as synonyms or close parallels — as words that “rhyme” in their meaning in what we think we understand of ancient Hebrew poetry. See, for example, Amos 5:24: “But let justice roll on like a river, / righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
The vastly different connotations of the two words in contemporary English are something we might read back into the Psalms, but for the original writers and readers, those two concepts were much closer and more similar than they seem to be to us.
So Romans 3 — “There is no one righteous, not even one” — seems to us to be saying something very different from Psalm 14 & 53 — “There is no one who does good, not even one.” Those seem like vastly different statements to us, but they would not have seemed so different to the Psalmists or to Paul.
Why? Because “justice” and “righteousness” could not be allowed to remain similar in meaning by people seeking to regard themselves as righteous but desperate to avoid justice.**
In other words, while Wolterstorff is certainly correct that English-speaking American Christians reading the New Testament “face a serious linguistic obstacle to apprehending what these writings say about justice,” that linguistic obstacle is not their biggest problem.
We can, and should, remove that linguistic obstacle by making our translation more accurate — by refusing to censor out the language of justice, replacing it with the light-weight,*** intangible piety of “righteousness.” But we should also recognize that the problem here is not primarily the language.
* The quote can be found in both Psalm 14 and Psalm 53, which are nearly identical. The first four verses of both short Psalms are the same, as is the final verse, with just one verse differing between the two. But we can’t really know whether these two Psalms are actually nearly identical. We can only know that they are nearly identical lyrically. The music — which we do not have and cannot now know — may have been completely different. And it may have been completely different in meaningful, significant ways.
** There’s a chicken-or-egg question here about the divergence in meaning between “just” and “righteous” and between “justice” and “righteousness.” Did “righteousness” supplant “justice” in our English Bibles because we preferred its upright-means-uptight, abstract, far-removed-from-justice connotations? Or did the word acquire all of those connotations due to our preference for them?
We might imagine an alternative history of white Christianity in America in which we had more accurate translations with the word “justice” echoing throughout the New Testament as it does throughout the prophets. Would that language have caused us to become more just? Or would we simply have followed the same path of abstracting all the meaning out of language in an effort to justify our injustice? In that alternative world, the word “justice” may have become as ethereal and insubstantial as the word “righteousness” now seems to be.
But in a world in which the word “justice” was the term corrupted by the otherworldly abstraction white Christianity requires to accommodate injustice. perhaps the term “righteousness” would be spared that corruption. Maybe in that world, what we call “injustice” would be called “unrighteousness.” Maybe the President Grant of that world would create the Department of Righteousness to beat back the Klan and enforce the Reconstruction Amendments.
*** In Matthew 23:23, Jesus refers to justice as “the weightier matters.” Or, as the NIV puts it, as “more important.“
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