Is anyone righteous or good, if “there is none righteous, no, not one”?

The Bible uses ‘righteous’ in two senses, and each passage uses it correctly. In the first sense, a righteous person is one who has never sinned and can stand before God’s judgement on his own record. In that sense no one is righteous: “in thy sight shall no man living be justified” (Psalm 143:2). Isaiah’s confession that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (64:6) belongs here too: God’s own people say it, measuring their best deeds against his holiness. In the second sense, a righteous person is one who is right with God through his mercy and who lives uprightly, trusting and obeying him, though not without fault. Noah, Job, Zechariah and Elisabeth were righteous in that sense.

Ecclesiastes 7:20 holds the two senses together in one sentence. The Hebrew reads, word for word, ‘there is no righteous man (tsaddiq) on earth who does good and does not sin’. The verse speaks of righteous people on earth, and says that even they sin. Tsaddiq is the same word used of Noah in Genesis 6:9, and Scripture does not hide the failings of those it calls righteous: Noah became drunk (Genesis 9:21), and Zechariah, called blameless in Luke 1:6, was struck dumb later in the same chapter because he did not believe the angel (Luke 1:20). Even the Psalm that Paul quotes, “there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Psalm 14:3), goes on to speak of “the generation of the righteous” (14:5).

Paul’s point in Romans 3 is that no one, Jew or Gentile, can be justified by his own works (3:19-20). He then shows how sinners are made righteous: God “justifieth the ungodly” who believe (4:5). Hebrews says the same of Noah: he “became heir of the righteousness which is by faith” (Hebrews 11:7). So the righteous people of the Bible are not exceptions to Romans 3:10; they are examples of Romans 3:21-26. In the same way Jesus’ words about goodness in Mark 10:18 speak of goodness in the full sense, which belongs to God alone, while Luke can rightly call Joseph a good man in the ordinary sense.

The Psalms describe the wicked

Some commentators, such as Albert Barnes, stress that the Psalms Paul quotes describe the wicked of the psalmist’s own day. Paul uses them to show from Israel’s own Scriptures that Jews, not only Gentiles, are under sin, rather than to describe every individual. On this reading too, the godly people the Psalms speak of are not in view.

Imputed or imparted righteousness

Christians agree that no one is righteous before God apart from his grace, but they describe that grace differently. Lutheran and Reformed Christians stress righteousness credited to the believer for Christ’s sake (Romans 4:6), with upright living as its fruit. Catholic and Orthodox Christians stress the real inner renewal by which God’s grace makes a person righteous. Each reads Noah, Zechariah and Elisabeth as righteous by grace, not by a sinless record.

Interpreters differ on how far the Psalm texts in Romans 3:10-18 describe every single person and how far they describe humanity, and Israel in particular, as a whole. Either way, Paul’s conclusion is that “all have sinned” (3:23).