Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew

Era

First century

Region

Capernaum, Judea, and — by tradition — Ethiopia or Parthia

Category

Apostle, Evangelist, and martyr

Principal feast for this profile

November 16

About 5 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to The Man at the Booth Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

The Man at the Booth

Jesus was walking out of Capernaum. There was a man sitting at the tax booth, and He said: Follow Me. And he got up and followed Him.

That is the whole of the call. What gives it weight is what a tax booth was. Rome did not collect its indirect taxes with civil servants; it auctioned the right to collect them. A contractor bid for a district’s revenue, paid the contract, and kept whatever he could extract above it. The man at the booth in Capernaum was at the bottom of that arrangement — a local, working for the men who worked for the occupier, enriching himself at his neighbours’ expense, and handling Gentile money and Gentile people all day long. He was not merely unpopular. He was categorised. Publicans and sinners is not an insult the Gospels invented; it is a social fact they report.

And the first thing that happens after the call is a dinner. Matthew’s house, full of tax collectors and sinners, with Jesus at the table — and the objection, and the answer: those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.

Where the Record Comes From

The name. Matthew’s Gospel calls the man at the booth Matthew. Mark calls him Levi the son of Alphaeus; Luke calls him Levi. The scene is the same in all three — the booth, the call, the dinner, the objection — but Mark and Luke never say that Levi and Matthew are the same person, and neither does anyone else in the New Testament. The identification is ancient and virtually universal, and it is an inference. The usual explanation is two names for one man, as with Simon and Peter or Saul and Paul, which is perfectly plausible. It is still an inference, and it is more honest to call it one.

The oldest thing said about the writing of any Gospel is about this one. Papias of Hierapolis, early second century, preserved only because Eusebius quotes him: Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew dialect, and each interpreted them as he was able.

That one sentence is the beginning of a problem nobody has solved. Oracles — logia — could mean a collection of sayings, a full narrative gospel, or even a collection of Old Testament proof texts. Nobody has the document. And the Greek Matthew we possess does not read like a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic: it reproduces Mark’s Greek closely, and it quotes the Old Testament in Greek, following the Septuagint in places where a translator working from Hebrew would not. So either Papias means an earlier document that is not our Matthew, or he is describing something we no longer have, or he is simply mistaken. He is early, and he is quite possibly right about something — but not obviously about the book in your hands.

Irenaeus, around 180, states it flatly and without Papias’s ambiguity: Matthew issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own language while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome.

The critical position, stated fairly. Most historical-critical scholars regard the Gospel as an anonymous Greek composition of roughly AD 80–90, probably from Antioch or Syria, working from Mark and from other material, and written after the fall of Jerusalem in 70. A minority of scholars argue for an earlier date and direct apostolic authorship, giving Papias more weight. Both are live positions held by serious people. Neither should be presented as settled.

The later life. Ancient sources are near-unanimous that his mission field was Ethiopia — with the caveat that ancient geography was loose, and a number of scholars think the word here means a region near the Caspian, in old Parthia, rather than Africa. The martyrdom accounts vary and are late: one has him burned to death by a ruler named Fulvian; another, elaborated in the medieval Golden Legend, has him killed at the altar by a king whose intended bride he had persuaded to remain consecrated. These belong to the genre of apocryphal Acts, written centuries after, and are not corroborated by anything earlier.

The winged man. The four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation were matched to the four evangelists early, but not consistently — Irenaeus’s assignments are not the ones that became standard. Matthew’s symbol is the man, because his Gospel begins with a human genealogy, and this one at least was stable from Irenaeus onward.

Why the Church Remembers Him

Because of who was called, and what he was allowed to keep.

Peter left his nets. Andrew left his nets. Matthew left a franchise. There was no going back to a tax booth once you had walked away from one — the contract would have gone to someone else by the following week. Of all the Twelve, his was the call that could not be reversed.

And the skill did not go to waste. Whatever the exact history of the book that bears his name, the Church has always felt the rightness of a man who kept records for a living being the one associated with the Gospel that carefully arranges, catalogues, and cross-references — five great discourses, a genealogy, and citation after citation of the prophets. The man who wrote things down for Rome ended up writing things down for the Church.

What His Life Asks of Us

That Christ calls people the community has already finished judging, and does not wait for them to make amends first. The dinner comes before anything else. Matthew is not recorded repaying anyone, apologising to the village, or producing evidence of a changed life before being accepted. He is recorded getting up and then throwing a party.

And it asks something of what you do for a living. Matthew did not become a different kind of person with different abilities. He became the same careful, literate, record-keeping man, pointed somewhere else.

Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew, pray to Christ our God that we may rise at once when called, and that what we are good at may be turned to His service.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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