Is anyone good?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The question is whether the canon's universal-depravity statements and its particular-virtue descriptions can be held together. The honest answer is that the Old Testament side largely resolves on genre, while the harder residue is an internal Lukan one involving a single Greek word.

Isaiah 64:6 (MT 64:5) belongs to a communal lament. The surrounding verses plead with a God who has 'hidden his face' (64:7) over a people in exile: *wattĕmaʿăṭēnû bĕyad-ʿăwōnēnû* — 'and you have melted us into the hand of our iniquity.' The image *kĕbeged ʿiddîm* — 'like a menstruous/soiled garment' — describes the collective state of a guilty nation in a specific historical moment, not a metaphysical claim that no individual can possess any virtue. Blenkinsopp and Westermann both read it as corporate confession within the Trito-Isaianic lament, and to make it a universal anthropology (the Augustinian and later Calvinist use) is to lift it from its genre. The same caution applies to Paul's catena in Romans 3:10-12, which strings together Psalm 14:1-3 and other texts; Fitzmyer notes that Paul reapplies originally particular or hyperbolic statements to a universal forensic argument about Jew and Gentile alike standing 'under sin.' The Hebrew Psalm targets a class of fools and evildoers, not literally every human.

Meanwhile the Hebrew Bible cheerfully calls specific people righteous: Noah is *ʾîš ṣaddîq tāmîm* (Gen 6:9), Job is declared *tām wĕyāšār* by God himself (Job 1:8), and Luke 1:6 calls Zechariah and Elizabeth *dikaioi ... enantion tou theou*. Luke 23:50 describes Joseph of Arimathea as *anēr agathos kai dikaios* — 'a good and righteous man.'

The sharper problem is internal to Luke. In Luke 18:19 (paralleling Mark 10:18) Jesus responds to the address 'good teacher' with *ti me legeis agathon? oudeis agathos ei mē heis ho theos* — 'why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.' That is a flat denial of *agathos* to anyone but God. Yet the same author, five chapters later, applies *agathos* to Joseph of Arimathea. Marcus and Fitzmyer both note the theological awkwardness of the Markan saying — so much so that Matthew 19:17 rewrites it to blunt the implication ('Why do you ask me about what is good?'), a redactional tell that early scribes and evangelists already felt the tension.

The standard apologetic move — Bock, the IVP *Hard Sayings* tradition, and Carson — distinguishes absolute goodness (God alone) from relative or derivative goodness (humans being called good in a qualified sense). Theologically this is coherent: Joseph can be 'good' as a creature without claiming the unqualified moral perfection that belongs to God. The difficulty is that the Greek text does not mark the distinction. *Agathos* in Luke 18:19 and *agathos* in Luke 23:50 are the same lexeme with no qualifier; the relative/absolute split is supplied by the interpreter, not by the syntax. Where Luke wanted to qualify, as in 18:19, he could and did ('except God alone'); in 23:50 he does not.

Where the critical reading lands: overstated on the Old Testament side, where the lament and Psalm genres dissolve the apparent universal claim; partially harmonized overall, since the relative-vs-absolute distinction is theologically sound but is not encoded in the shared Greek vocabulary of Luke 18:19 and 23:50, leaving a residual lexical tension Matthew himself smoothed.