Matthew the Apostle

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A man is sitting at the place of toll when the sentence reaches him. He is counting other people’s money — duty on goods crossing into the territory, the coin of merchants and herdsmen and travelers passing the customs post on the road. Jesus goes by, looks at him, and says two words: follow me. The man stands up and goes, leaving the table and its takings where they lie, and that same day he is at supper with the teacher among others of his trade and others worse spoken of, while the respectable stand at the door and ask why. That is the whole of Matthew. The scene is told in three of the Gospels, and out of it the church built a saint, a missionary, a martyr, and the author of the first book of its canon — but the man himself never leaves the table-edge of that one sentence.

Caravaggio, “The Calling of Saint Matthew” (1599-1600), Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome — Caravaggio, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The publican’s office

The weight of the call sits in the office Matthew held when it found him. In the Gospel that bears his name he is a tax-collector — a telones, the term the older English Bibles render “publican” — stationed at a toll-booth in or near Capernaum, on the Galilean shore. Capernaum lay near a frontier and astride trade, close to the line dividing the lands of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, from his brother’s tetrarchy across the water; goods moving along the route from Damascus toward the coast paid as they crossed. Matthew sat at that crossing and took the levy. The proceeds fed the treasury of Antipas, a client prince inside the order of the Roman Empire, and a toll-agent of this kind worked on a hard arithmetic: he was answerable for a fixed sum and free to gather what he could above it, the surplus his to keep. The office bred extortion by design.

To his own people that made the toll-man a figure of disgust on two counts at once. He was a collaborator, an instrument of the occupying power and its princely subcontractors, growing fat on the passage of his neighbors’ bread; and he was reckoned unclean, his hands forever in foreign coin and his dealings forever with Gentiles, set outside the company of the observant within Second Temple Judaism. The Gospels make “tax-collectors and sinners” a single phrase, a byword for those past the edge of respectable society. This is the engine of the call story. That such a man should be summoned by name, without a word of reproof or a demand to first make himself clean, is the thing the scene presses. The early church read the call of Matthew as the very shape of how its founder gathered: a net thrown wide and without sorting, taking up by preference exactly those whom the careful had written off. The indiscriminate gathering is the doctrine the episode carries.

What the record gives, and what it withholds

Two of the Gospels do not call the toll-man Matthew at all. In the accounts of Mark and of Luke the identical scene — the booth, the two words, the rising, the scandalous table — names the man called away as Levi, in Mark “Levi son of Alphaeus.” Only in the first Gospel is he Matthew, and only there does the list of the Twelve add to his name the tag “the tax-collector.” No “Levi” stands in any of the four rosters of the apostles, which agree in naming Matthew — at Matthew 10, Mark 3, Luke 6, and the opening of the Acts of the Apostles. The long tradition has taken the two names for one man, a Galilean Jew bearing a second name as many did; the name Matthew itself, from the Hebrew Mattityahu, carries the sense of a gift of Yah, a gift of God. A current of modern scholarship hesitates here. Richard Bauckham, among others, finds it improbable that one Jewish disciple bore two Semitic names, and proposes instead that the writer of the first Gospel transferred Levi’s call-story to Matthew — the lone tax-collector the apostle-list already named — to tie the book to an apostle. The reading is contested and offered as conjecture; the older identification remains the common one. The question is held open between text and tradition.

Past the call and the lists, the record is silent on the man. He speaks no sentence anywhere in the New Testament. He works no recorded sign, founds no named church, dies in no narrated scene. Among the Gospel figures who grew vast in later memory he is among the barest in the documents — barer than Philip with his speaking parts in the fourth Gospel, barer than the night-visitor Nicodemus, close in this to Thomas before the doubting scene gave Thomas a voice. What Matthew has is one gesture: he got up.

The book and the man

The link binding this apostle to the first Gospel — the Gospel of Matthew — is the work of tradition more than of evidence, and the two questions, who the man was and who wrote the book, came apart under study and have not been rejoined. The oldest notice is a sentence of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, preserved because the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea quoted it two centuries later in his Ecclesiastical History: Matthew, Papias reports, collected or set in order the logia — the sayings, the oracles — in the Hebrew tongue, and each interpreted them as best he could. Eusebius elsewhere passes on the fuller tradition that Matthew, having first preached among the Hebrews and being about to go to others, wrote down his Gospel in his native language and so made up by writing for the absence of his voice. From these reports the whole book came to bear the apostle’s name.

The tradition and the criticism diverge sharply on what the reports are worth. A word matters first: logia most naturally means sayings, not a finished narrative life of Jesus, and so Papias may describe a Hebrew or Aramaic collection of teachings, not the book now in the canon. That book, by the scholarly account, is a Greek composition through and through — not a translation from a Semitic original but a work conceived in Greek, drawing on the earlier Greek Gospel of Mark and on a further sayings-source, written most likely in the last decades of the first century by an author who left no name. On this reading the apostolic ascription is the church’s own claim about the text, fixed in the second century, rather than a record of whose hand held the pen; whatever Hebrew logia Papias knew, if he knew any, are lost and do not correspond to the Greek Matthew. The matter is held here as tradition set against scholarship, the one naming the apostle and the other an anonymous evangelist, with the office of judging the title-page deferred to the entry on the text itself. The two have not been brought back into one.

Caravaggio, “The Inspiration of Saint Matthew” (1602), San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, depicting the apostle writing his Gospel — Caravaggio, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The legendary apostle

Where the documents fall silent, the later centuries supplied a missionary. The traditions are many and they disagree. Eastern menologies and the Latin acta send Matthew, after the Hebrews, to preach among the Parthians and Medes and Persians of the lands east of the empire — to Parthia and its neighbors — and to Pontus on the Black Sea, and to a region the sources call Ethiopia, a name that in these texts can mean the Pontic coast as easily as Africa. A snare runs through this material: the apocryphal tale of the apostle among the man-eaters of a far city, the Acts of Andrew and Matthias, attaches by the near-twin names not to Matthew but to Matthias, the apostle chosen by lot to fill the place of Judas, and the two were confounded early and often. Set the confusion aside and the firmest thing that can be said is that no early and reliable source records where Matthew went after the resurrection, or what he did, or how he ended.

The death is the murkiest part. One strand of tradition gives him a martyr’s end — run through with a sword or a halberd as he stood at the altar, in a story that names a king he had rebuked; other strands set the killing in Persia or Parthia or Pontus rather than Ethiopia, disagreeing on place and manner alike; and a further tradition lets him die in peace after a long life, no martyr at all. None of these accounts can be traced to a source near his own time. Later devotion gave the relics a home — the city of Salerno in southern Italy holds that his remains were brought there in the tenth century and keeps him as its patron in the cathedral that bears his name — but this too belongs to the afterlife of the figure, dated and attributed, not to the record of the man.

Caravaggio, “The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew” (c. 1599-1600), Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, picturing one strand of the death tradition — Caravaggio, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The winged man and the autumn feast

Christian art fixed Matthew long before it could fix his biography, and it fixed him by a sign drawn from the prophet Ezekiel. In Ezekiel’s vision by the river, four living creatures bear four faces — of a man, a lion, an ox, an eagle — and the four reappear about the throne in the Revelation of John. The church distributed the four among the four evangelists, the tetramorph, and to Matthew it gave the man: a winged human figure, an angel in human form, set beside him as his emblem and often shown holding his pen or his book. The reason is the way the Gospel begins — with the human genealogy of Jesus, the descent traced through the generations, the line of a man. The assignment was not always so. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, paired the creatures with the evangelists in a different order; the arrangement that became standard — the man to Matthew, the lion to Mark, the ox to Luke, the eagle to John — was set out by Victorinus in the third century and made authoritative by Jerome in the fourth, carried thereafter into the Book of Kells and the whole inheritance of Western and Eastern Christian image-making.

He is venerated as a saint across the churches, the patron claimed by those whose work is money and its reckoning — accountants, bankers, customs men, tax-collectors after his old trade. His feast falls in autumn: the twenty-first of September in the Western calendar, the sixteenth of November in the East. The painters returned to him most often not at his death but at his beginning — most famously Caravaggio, whose canvas in a Roman chapel catches the toll-table at the instant the pointing hand arrives and the light crosses the room. 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.

Guido Reni, “Saint Matthew and the Angel” (c. 1635-1640), showing the evangelist with his winged-man emblem holding his pen — Guido Reni, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Sources and scholarship

The primary witness to Matthew the man is thin and quickly read: the call at the toll-booth (Matthew 9:9, with the parallels at Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27-28 naming Levi) and his place in the four apostle-lists (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13). The earliest tradition on the authorship runs through Papias of Hierapolis, surviving only as quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in the Ecclesiastical History — the logia-in-Hebrew notice at 3.39.16 and the fuller account of Matthew writing for the Hebrews at 3.24; the relevant passages are compiled with translations at Catholic Resources, and Bart Ehrman sets out the cruxes of the Papias fragment in a clear summary of the evidence. For the figure as the churches receive him — the office, the legends, the feast, the iconography — the Britannica article on Saint Matthew gives a sober overview. The standard critical commentaries on the Gospel treat the authorship question at length: W. D. Davies and Dale Allison’s three-volume Matthew in the International Critical Commentary (1988-1997), and the work of Ulrich Luz, set the consensus that the canonical book is an anonymous Greek composition; Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006) carries the minority case for the apostolic associations of the Gospel traditions and frames the Levi-Matthew problem most pointedly.

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