This article contributes to the debates concerning righteousness terminology in early Christianity by demonstrating the potential of the distant reading approach to the topic. The crucial part of this demonstration is providing a comparison of the results obtained by these quantitative methods from the area of computational linguistics and distributional semantics to those obtained by close reading, i.e., an established method of reading and interpreting individual texts. In addition to this methodological validation, we discuss the potential of distant reading to reveal trends in large corpora of textual data that can be too subtle to be detected by close reading as well as the limits of this quantitative methodology. The article employs a comprehensive corpus of publicly available ancient Greek texts from the Homeric period to Late Antiquity which includes archaic and classical Greek, Jewish, Pauline, and other early Christian literature