The English translation of righteousness, especially in the New Testament is questioned by Nicholas Wolterstorff (2008, p. 110ff.) (Click or tap here to see the details)
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 dikaiosunē (δικαιοσύνη); the adjective standardly translated as “just” is dikaios (δίκαιος). 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 horn the Latin iustitia, and the word “right” and its grammatical variants coining 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 dikaiosunē. 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 dikaiosunē. 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. There is, indeed, a long tradition of philosophical and theological discussion on the virtue of justice. But that use of the term has almost dropped out of idiomatic English; we do not often speak any more of a person as just. And in any case, the concept of the virtue of justice presupposes the concept of those social relationships that are just.
So when the New Testament writers speak of dikaiosunē, are they speaking of righteousness or of justice? Is Jesus blessing those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or those who hunger and thirst for justice?
A thought that comes to mind is that the word changed meaning between Plato and the New Testament. Had Jesus’ words been uttered in Plato’s time and place, they would have been understood as blessing those who hunger and thirst for the social condition of justice. In Jesus’ time and place, they would have been understood as blessing (hose who hunger and thirst for righteousness — that is, for personal moral rectitude.
Between the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament there came the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. (…) One of the challenges facing the Septuagint translators was how to catch, in the Greek of their day, the combination of mishpat (מִשְׁפָּט) with tsedeq (צֶ֫דֶק). Tsedeq that we find so often in the Old Testament, standardly translated into English as justice and righteousness. The solution they settled on was to translate tsedeq as dikaiosunē, and to use a term whose home use was in legal situations, namely, krisis (κρίσις), to translate mishpat. Mishpat and tsedeq became krisis and dikaiosunē. For the most part, this is also how they translated the Hebrew words even when they were not explicitly paired with each other: mishpat (justice) becomes krisis, tsedeq (righteousness) becomes dikaiosunē. The pattern is not entirely consistent, however; every now and then, when mishpat is not paired off with tsedeq, it is translated with dikaiosunē or some other dik-stem word (e.g., 1 Kings 3:28, Proverbs 17:23, Isaiah 61:8).
I think the conclusion that those of us who are not specialists in Hellenistic Greek should draw from this somewhat bewildering array of data is that, in the linguistic circles of the New Testament writers, dikaiosunē did not refer definitively either to the character trait of righteousness (shorn of its negative connotations) or to the social condition of justice, but was ambiguous as between those two. If dikaiosunē had referred decisively in Hellenistic Greek to righteousness rather than to justice, why would the Septuagint translators sometimes use it to translate mishpat, why would Catholic translators [into the 1980s] usually translate it as “justice,” and why would all English translators sometimes translate it as “justice”? (All earlier Latin-based Catholic translations, the New American Bible and the Jerusalem Bible, both of which appeared in the early 1970s have most occurrences of dik-stem words translated with variants on “just.” In subsequent revisions of the New American Bible, and in the New Jerusalem Bible, these translations have been altered to translations along the lines of righteousness. Other translations that use a form of justice or “doing right / rightness” include the British New English Bible [1970] and Revised English Bible [1989] and some newer translations such as by Hart [2017], Ruden [2021] or McKnight [2023]).
Conversely, if it referred decisively to justice, why would the Septuagint translators usually not use it to translate mishpat, and why would almost all translators sometimes translate it as “righteousness”? Context will have to determine whether, in a given case, it is best translated as “justice” or as “righteousness” — or as something else instead; and if context does not determine, then it would be best, if possible, to preserve the ambiguity and use some such ambiguous expression as “what is right” or “the right thing.”
Let me make one final observation about translation. 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.
