Matthew the Apostle

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Matthew is one of the twelve apostles named in the Gospels, remembered above all as the tax-collector whom Jesus called away from his collection booth to follow him. The scene is brief. In the Gospel that bears his name, Jesus passes a man named Matthew sitting at the place of toll, says “Follow me,” and the man rises and goes — and afterward sits at table with him among other tax-collectors and sinners, to the scandal of onlookers. The same episode appears in Mark and Luke with the man called Levi, son of Alphaeus, and tradition has long taken the two names to belong to one person.

Beyond that call and his place on the apostle lists, the New Testament says almost nothing about him as an individual. He speaks no recorded words; he performs no named act. What gives the figure his weight is the office he held before the calling. A tax-collector under Roman administration was, to many of his own people, a collaborator and an extortioner — a man grown rich at his neighbors’ expense and ritually compromised by his dealings with the occupier. That such a man should be summoned, by name and without preamble, is the point the Gospel presses; the early church read the call of Matthew as the pattern of how its founder gathered followers, taking up exactly those whom the respectable had written off.

The link between this apostle and the Gospel of Matthew is itself a matter of tradition rather than established fact. An early-second-century notice, preserved by the church historian Eusebius, holds that Matthew set down the sayings of Jesus “in the Hebrew tongue,” and from this the whole Gospel came to bear his name. Modern scholarship generally regards the work as a later Greek composition by an anonymous author drawing on earlier sources, and treats the apostolic attribution as the church’s own claim about the text rather than a report of who held the pen. The two questions — who the man was, and who wrote the book — came apart under critical study and have not been rejoined.

The later biography is the work of legend. Various traditions send him to preach in Ethiopia, in Persia, among the Parthians; several hold that he died a martyr, though the accounts disagree on where and how, and none can be traced to a reliable early source. Christian art settled on a stable iconography regardless: Matthew is shown with a winged man or angel, one of the four living creatures of Ezekiel’s vision assigned to the evangelists, because his Gospel opens with the human genealogy of Jesus. He is venerated as a saint across the churches, and his feast is kept in autumn. The historical person remains, in the end, the man at the toll booth who got up — the rest gathered to that single sentence over the centuries that followed.

→ Related: St Peter · Gospel Of St Matthew · The Didache