Matthew the Evangelist

The call from the toll-booth

Matthew was a Galilean of Capernaum, the lakeside customs-town on the road from Damascus to the sea, and he sat there as a telōnēs — a publican, a tax-collector or toll-gatherer in the service of Rome and of Herod Antipas the tetrarch. It was the most despised of trades among the Jews: the publican collected the duties of an occupying power from his own countrymen, commonly at a profit wrung above the appointed rate, and the rabbis ranked him with robbers and reckoned his testimony worthless and his money unclean. In the Gospels "publicans and sinners" are named in one breath, and "publican and harlot" in another. That a man of this trade should be called to the apostolate is the whole meaning of his story, and the Church never lets it be forgotten: Matthew alone, of all the evangelists, sets down his own former calling as a title of shame in the very list of the Twelve — "Matthew the publican" (Matthew 10:3) — where the other lists pass it in silence.

The three Synoptic Gospels each tell the call, and their differences hold the key to his identity. Matthew's own Gospel: "And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him" (Matthew 9:9). Mark and Luke tell the same scene at the same place and moment, but name the man Levi — Mark calls him "Levi the son of Alphaeus" (Mark 2:14), Luke simply "a publican, named Levi" (Luke 5:27). That the tax-collector of the toll-booth whom Matthew's Gospel names "Matthew" is the Levi of Mark and Luke is the ancient and unbroken tradition of the Church: the man bore two names, Levi his given name and Matthew — Mattithyah, "gift of the Lord" — the name under which he entered the apostolic company, as Simon became Peter and Saul Paul. (A minority of modern critics have tried to prise the two apart, making Levi a disciple who was not of the Twelve; the identity of scene, place, and act, and the universal witness of antiquity, stand against them, and the Church knows one man.) Because Mark names Levi "son of Alphaeus," an old tradition — held by the Slavic synaxaria and the Orthodox Church in America's Lives — makes Matthew a brother of the Apostle James the son of Alphaeus; the equation is possible but unproven, and is recorded here as tradition (see that entry's Disputed questions).

The banquet

The call was answered by a feast. "And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them" (Luke 5:29); Matthew and Mark set the scene in the house where "many publicans and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples" (Matthew 9:10; Mark 2:15). The newly called apostle gathered his old associates — the only society a publican had — around the Lord's table, and it was the scandal of the meal that drew from Christ the words the Church has treasured as the charter of repentance. The Pharisees and scribes murmured to the disciples, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?" and Jesus, hearing, answered: "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matthew 9:11–13). It is Matthew's own Gospel that alone adds the citation from Hosea, "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice" — the evangelist, characteristically, reaching back to a prophet to interpret the deed, and setting at the head of his apostolic life the sentence by which he himself had been called.

Apostle among the Twelve

From the toll-booth Matthew passed into the innermost history of the Gospel. He is named in every list of the Twelve — Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15, Acts 1:13 — was sent out with the others two by two to preach the Kingdom and heal, ate the Mystical Supper, saw the risen Lord, and stood in the upper room at the election of Matthias and among those on whom the Holy Spirit descended in tongues of fire at Pentecost. Beyond the call and the banquet the Gospels record no separate word or deed of his; like most of the Twelve his person is absorbed into the apostolic company. What sets him apart from the rest is not a recorded act but a book.

The Gospel

Matthew is the author of the first Gospel, and the tradition of the Church from the second century has held it the earliest written. Papias of Hierapolis, about the year 120 — a man within living reach of the apostolic age — recorded that "Matthew composed the logia (the oracles, or sayings) in the Hebrew dialect (Hebraïdi dialektō), and each interpreted them as he was able." Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome repeat and expand the notice: Matthew, they say, wrote first, in Hebrew (that is, in the Aramaic of Palestine), for the Hebrew believers, before departing to preach among the nations, and his Gospel was afterward rendered into the Greek in which the Church has always possessed it. Whether the Greek Matthew is a translation of a lost Aramaic original or a fresh Greek composition drawing on Hebrew sources is a question disputed since antiquity and unresolved; what the whole tradition agrees is that this is the Gospel of the Hebrews — written by a Jew, for Jews, to show their own Scriptures fulfilled in Jesus the Christ.

Everything in the book bears that stamp. It opens not, like Mark, in the wilderness, nor, like John, in eternity, but with a genealogy: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham" — tracing the Lord's human descent through the royal line of Judah from the father of the chosen people, and so answering, at the very threshold, the Jewish question of the Messiah's pedigree. Through the whole narrative runs the refrain of the fulfilment-citations — "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet" — some dozen and more times, binding the events of Christ's life to Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and the Psalms, so that the Gospel reads as the harvest of the whole Old Testament. And the Lord's teaching is gathered, with an evangelist's architectural care, into five great discourses, each closed by the formula "when Jesus had finished these sayings": the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5–7), with the Beatitudes, the new law of the Kingdom, and the Lord's Prayer; the missionary charge to the Twelve (chapter 10); the parables of the Kingdom (chapter 13); the ecclesial discourse on life in the community (chapter 18); and the discourse on the last things (chapters 24–25) with the judgement of the nations. Matthew's is the only Gospel to name the Church (ekklēsia) — "upon this rock I will build my Church" (16:18), and "tell it unto the Church" (18:17) — and it closes with the Great Commission from the mountain in Galilee: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost… and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (28:19–20). From the genealogy of Abraham's son to the sending of the apostles to all nations, the book carries the reader from Israel to the world; and its dominant phrase, "the kingdom of heaven," reverent Jewish circumlocution for "the kingdom of God," betrays the hand and the audience of the tax-collector of Capernaum.

The mission

Of the apostle's labours after Pentecost the New Testament says nothing, and the later traditions diverge widely, as they do for most of the Twelve. The common account, gathered from the synaxaria and the Lives, sends Matthew first to preach among his own people in Palestine and Syria, and then to the East and South — to Media, Persia, and Parthia in some traditions, and above all to Ethiopia, the land most firmly attached to his name. The "Ethiopia" of his apostolate is that of the apocryphal Acts and Martyrdom of Matthew — a land of dark-skinned peoples reckoned by the storytellers as anthropophagi, men of savage custom — which the ancient geographers placed vaguely, some toward the Black Sea and Colchis, some in Africa proper; the tradition should not be pressed into modern cartography. There, the account runs, Matthew founded the Church, built a temple in the city of Myrmene, and set his companion Plato over it as bishop.

Martyrdom and repose

The manner of the apostle's end is told in two strands, and the Church has never harmonised them. The fuller tradition, drawn from the apocryphal Acts and repeated in the Slavic Lives, is a martyrdom by fire bound up with the legend of King Fulvian of Ethiopia. As Matthew prayed for the conversion of the people, the Lord appeared to him as a youth and gave him a staff to plant by the church door, from which grew a tree bearing fruit and a spring of sweet water, so that the fierce people who ate and drank of it were made gentle. Fulvian's own wife and son, tormented by unclean spirits, were healed by the apostle in the name of Christ, and many believed; but the king, unwilling to lose his gods and his sway, charged Matthew with sorcery and condemned him to the flames. They laid him bound upon the ground, heaped brushwood over him, and kindled it — and the fire did not touch him. Fulvian piled on more wood and set twelve idols round the pyre; the flames melted the idols and leapt out toward the king, who, terrified, begged the saint's prayers, and at the martyr's word the fire died. Matthew's body lay unharmed, and he gave up his spirit to the Lord. Still doubting, Fulvian shut the body in an iron coffin and cast it into the sea, saying that if the God who had kept it from the fire kept it also in the waters, he would worship him alone. The apostle appeared by night to Bishop Plato and led him to the shore, where the coffin had been borne to the very church Matthew had built; and Fulvian, believing at last, was baptised with the name Matthew at the apostle's own command, laid down his crown, was ordained presbyter, and in time — again by the apostle's heavenly bidding — succeeded Plato as bishop of the Ethiopian Church.

Against this dramatic passion stands a quieter tradition, followed by part of the Greek synaxaria, that Matthew died in peace, without a martyr's death, after a long apostolate — and yet others that report his end by the sword or by transfixion. The divergence is old and unresolved; the calendars style him Apostle and Evangelist without insisting on the crown of blood, and the fullest legend is recorded above frankly as tradition, the deposit of the apocryphal Acts rather than of history. What is certain is that he laboured and died in the apostolic age, in the first century, one of the eyewitnesses who carried the Gospel he had written out to the nations.

Relics

The relics venerated as the apostle's have rested since the tenth century at Salerno in southern Italy. The tradition brings them from the East by way of Paestum (Velia) on the Lucanian coast, whence they were translated into the city in 954 and enshrined in the cathedral that bears his name, San Matteo; Pope Gregory VII consecrated the rebuilt Norman cathedral over the apostle's tomb in 1084. Matthew is the patron of Salerno, and the crypt beneath the high altar, where the relics lie, has been a place of pilgrimage through the centuries — the westward resting-place of the evangelist of the Hebrews.