Is There Righteousness Outside of Christ? A Reading of Mark 2:17

I want to focus on a particular verse that has caused me to pause for a number of years.

It comes from Mark 2:17 in which Jesus says he has not come to call the righteous but sinners. The call, as it were, is to repentance, the Hebrew meaning t’shuva (to turn).

All the best translations read “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” Only the New Living Translation (NLT) adds the words “who think they are” righteous. If we adopt the plain interpretation, then what this means is that Jesus was indeed acknowledging the righteous in distinction to the unrighteousness of others. How does this verse function?  Almost invariably the focus on this verse is the problem caused by the word “sinners.” Who are the sinners? Are they the tax collectors like Levi who appears in this context? Are they an amalgam of different groups?

When we consider the audience to whom Jesus is addressing his response, we see it is not his disciples, but the perpetual foils of his ministry, the Pharisees. So Jesus appears to be telling the Pharisees that he is not calling them “the righteous” but is calling sinners to salvation. We are of course not to believe that the Pharisees are righteous. After all, they continually antagonize Jesus with questions, which is not at all problematic in the rabbinical haberim tradition, but is often set up this way in the Christian scriptures due to a reading of Jesus’ special authority to make statements that we are to believe are unique even though many are rooted in Judaism. This is not to make a value judgment, but simply to say that Jesus was a rabbi of his time and would have spoken in a language that made sense to the people. This veiled accusation as we may call it pops up again in John, where Jesus heals a blind man but in turn indicts the Pharisees of spiritual blindness.

A common interpretation such as that made by conservative biblical exegete Ben Witherington III is that 17a is ironic. The Pharisees certainly can’t be righteous, but since they think they are righteous (as we can recall the exchange between John the Baptist) because they are born of Abraham, Jesus is calling them out subtly. Yet this interpretation of the data runs into problems. First it seems to create a special condition of unbelief in which Jesus is unable to win over individuals, namely those who are self-deceived. Second, if Jesus who is the embodiment of God’s salvation is not meant for everyone, we are dealing with special election. Saying some people are not even called conflicts with the larger picture of salvation we like to see when we take the New Testament as a whole. Interestingly, the NLT that adopts this reading as those “who think themselves righteous,” adopts a method of dynamic equivalence, i.e., rendering the Greek and Hebrew into “how it would be understood” by an English readership. That means the translators aren’t simply reorganizing the sentence structure to make grammatical sense of the Greek, but they are also imposing their own interpretative gloss. In either case, we’re left with a particularly demanding problem: We have a general sense that salvation is for all, at least in Pauline Christianity, for even Jesus commands his disciples not to go outside of the house of Israel. But now we have a case where we must explain why some are not worthy to be called, and the options left to us are simply that Jesus will simply have nothing to do with these kinds of self-deceived individuals who are in reality sinners themselves are that Jesus recognizes that there is a righteous element outside of his own unique call to salvation. In this second case, Jesus need not at all be speaking directly to the Pharisees, but may be speaking of a general condition of righteousness, which indeed we can see in other examples, especially with the pericope of the rich, young ruler. He acknowledges the Torah, saying that not one jot will perish from it, so that to be serious about this statement is to understand that those dimensions referring to salvation that comes by YHWH must remain real and effectual and unchanging to some extent.

The uniqueness of the salvation that we sense comes by the cross cannot be retroacted into Jesus’ earthly ministry with completely satisfactory results. This is because Jesus still acknowledges righteous behavior and behavior worthy of salvation outside himself. Acknowledging this means that when we read of another righteousness, it is a real righteousness that does indeed make sense of other verses in the theology of the Synoptics.