A Man the Crowd Would Have Despised
In first-century Judea, few figures attracted more contempt than the tax collector — a Jew who worked for the Roman imperial system, collecting duties on behalf of an occupying power and, by widespread reputation, lining his own pockets in the process. Matthew, also called Levi and identified as the son of Alphaeus, was one of these men. He operated a customs post in Capernaum, the busy fishing town on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. He was, by the standards of his community, a traitor and an outcast.
That is precisely the kind of person Jesus of Nazareth chose to call.
The Call at the Tax Booth
The account appears in three of the four Gospels — Matthew 9, Mark 2, and Luke 5 — and it is startling in its brevity. Jesus passes the customs post, sees the man sitting there, and says simply: "Follow me." Matthew rises and follows. No negotiation, no hesitation recorded. The moment is one of the most compressed conversion scenes in all of Scripture.
"As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. 'Follow me,' he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him." — Matthew 9:9 (NIV)
What follows is equally striking. Matthew hosts a banquet — a large one, according to Luke — and invites his fellow tax collectors and other social outcasts to dine with Jesus. The Pharisees object. Jesus answers with a line that would define his ministry: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." The meal becomes a manifesto. Matthew's table is the first public statement that this movement would not sort people by their reputation.
Among the Twelve
Matthew is listed among the Twelve Apostles in all four canonical lists (Matthew 10, Mark 3, Luke 6, Acts 1). He is never a central figure in the Gospel narratives the way Peter the Apostle or John the Apostle are — he does not walk on water, does not appear at the Transfiguration, does not ask the probing questions at the Last Supper. He is, in the narrative, a quiet presence. Yet his name opens the entire New Testament canon.
Tradition, expressed by early Church writers including Papias of Hierapolis (c. 125 AD) and Irenaeus of Lyon, holds that Matthew composed a Gospel account, originally perhaps in Aramaic or Hebrew, for a Jewish-Christian audience. The Gospel of Matthew as it stands in the New Testament canon is the most Jewish of the four Gospels — dense with Old Testament quotations, structured around five great discourses (echoing the five books of Moses), and deeply concerned with demonstrating that Jesus fulfills the Hebrew prophets. Whether Matthew wrote it in its final Greek form or whether an earlier Semitic source underlies it remains a live question in biblical scholarship.
Legacy and Significance
The Gospel attributed to Matthew became, in the early Church, the most widely cited of the four. Its opening genealogy anchors Jesus of Nazareth in the line of Abraham and David. Its Sermon on the Mount — the most celebrated ethical discourse in Western civilization — appears only here in its full form. The Great Commission, which closes the Gospel and sends the disciples to all nations, shaped Christian mission for two millennia.
Matthew is venerated as a saint and martyr across Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions, though the location and manner of his death remain uncertain. In Christian iconography he is represented by a winged man — or angel — the symbol drawn from the vision in Ezekiel and Revelation, signifying the human and genealogical emphasis of his Gospel. A tax collector's ledger became, in the hands of tradition, the book that opened the New Testament.