Matthew (Levi)
Of all the Twelve, Matthew had the most to lose by following Jesus and the least chance of getting it back. A fisherman can return to his boat. A tax collector who walks away from his booth has handed his franchise to someone else permanently.
Key Takeaways
(This section follows the Key Takeaways format — see that page for what each part is for.)
Lessons about Jesus
Jesus called Matthew at the booth, before he had resigned, made restitution, or demonstrated anything. The call came to a man mid-transaction in a despised job, and the response required was two words' worth of obedience.
Memory verse
✝️ Matthew 9:13 (ESV)
13 Go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.' For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners."
Be transformed
Matthew's first recorded act as a disciple was to throw a large dinner and fill it with tax collectors, the people he already knew, who would not have been welcome anywhere else. Your existing address book may be the assignment.
Prayer
Lord, you called a man everyone had written off, and you did it without preconditions. Thank you that you desire mercy and not sacrifice. Give us the courage to bring the people we actually know to your table. In Jesus' name. Amen.
The name
Matthew: Μαθθαῖος (Maththaios, math-THAI-oss, G3156), from Hebrew מַתִּתְיָה (Mattityah, mat-tit-YAH, H4993): "gift of Yahweh."
Levi: לֵוִי (Lewi, lay-VEE, H3878), "attached, joined" (Genesis 29:34). Mark and Luke call him Levi at his calling (Mark 2:14; Luke 5:27); Matthew's Gospel calls him Matthew in the same scene. Both names for one man is unremarkable for the period.
Mark adds a detail: "he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth" (Mark 2:14). Another apostle is called James the son of Alphaeus. Whether they were brothers is not stated anywhere, Alphaeus was not a rare name, and no list groups the two men together; they sit in different groups of four. It is a loose end.
Background
A τελώνης (telōnēs, G5057, tel-O-nace): a collector of public revenue, working the toll station at Capernaum, on the trade road through Galilee. The Roman system farmed out collection rights: the collector paid for the franchise and recouped it, plus profit, from whatever he could extract above the required amount. The structure invited extortion and generally received it.
The social consequence was total. "Tax collectors and sinners" is a fixed phrase in the Gospels because the pairing needed no explanation. A telōnēs was regarded as both a thief and a collaborator with the occupying power, and was excluded from ordinary religious life.
That is the man whose name sits at position seven or eight in every list of the Twelve, two to four places from Simon the Zealot, whose political movement existed to drive out the empire Matthew worked for.
What Scripture records
The call is three sentences long in all three Synoptics:
✝️ Matthew 9:9 (ESV)
9 As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, "Follow me." And he rose and followed him.
Then the dinner. Luke says plainly that "Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them" (Luke 5:29). The Pharisees object to the company, and Jesus answers with a diagnosis and a quotation: those who are well have no need of a physician, and "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice", citing Hosea 6:6, and telling the religious experts to go and learn what it means.
Matthew never speaks in Scripture. Beyond the call and the feast, he appears only in the lists.
How he lists himself
Compare the four lists. In Mark and Luke, Matthew is named before Thomas. In the Gospel of Matthew, he is placed after Thomas, and he is the only one of the four writers to attach "the tax collector" to the name (Matthew 10:3).
Given that, on the traditional authorship below, this is the author's own list and his own name, moving himself down a place while adding the label everyone else left off is at minimum a distinctive editorial choice.
What tradition says
Traditions about Matthew's later ministry are unusually scattered: Ethiopia, Persia, Parthia, and elsewhere appear in different sources, with correspondingly varied accounts of his death. There is no early consensus, and little that can be relied on.
An early and better-attested tradition is literary. Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, is quoted by Eusebius (Church History 3.39) as saying Matthew compiled the sayings "in the Hebrew dialect." Papias's own writings are lost, so he survives only in quotation, but this is the earliest surviving statement linking Matthew to a written record.
Irenaeus says the same thing later that century, and adds a date:
Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church.
— Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1
Whether Irenaeus knew this independently or was drawing on Papias cannot be settled. What "their own dialect" refers to (Hebrew, Aramaic, or a Semitic style of Greek) has been argued over ever since, and the question is not closed. See Patristic Sources.
Takeaway
Matthew is the answer to whether there is a category of person too compromised to be called. He was the most obviously disqualified man in the group, he was called at work without preconditions, and he responded by introducing Jesus to a large company of his fellow tax collectors, and then, when he wrote it down, refused to leave out what he had been.
References
Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the English Standard Version (Crossway). Etymology from Strong's Greek Dictionary (public domain), G3156 and G5057, with Strong's Hebrew Dictionary H4993 and H3878. Note that the derivation field for G3156 in the public Strong's data used here is corrupt (it points to G3164, "to quarrel"); the entry's own gloss and the parallel entry G3161 Mattathias both give the correct Hebrew origin, H4993, "gift of Jah."