Who Was Matthew the Tax Collector? (9 of 13)

Matthew is the one member of the Twelve who could not go back.

Peter and Andrew could return to the boats, and after the crucifixion they did. A man who walked away from a tax booth had no such option. The position was bid for, the network was closed, and nobody was holding it open for him.

Who Was Matthew in the Bible?

A tax collector at Capernaum, working a customs post on a trade route.

The location is not incidental. Tolls were charged on goods in transit, so collectors were stationed where goods moved: seaports, caravan routes, and crossings near borders. The two towns where the Gospels put tax collectors are Capernaum and Jericho, and both sit on major roads near boundaries. Matthew was where the money passed.

His call takes one verse. Matt 9:9 says Jesus saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth and told him to follow, and Matthew got up and followed. No conversation is recorded and no conditions are set.

How Did Tax Farming Work in Roman Palestine?

By auction, and that is the part that matters.

Rome did not employ collectors directly. The right to collect was bid for competitively, and the winner guaranteed a fixed sum upward to the higher-level contractors who answered to Rome. Everything he could extract above that quota he kept.

Read that structure again. The system did not merely permit extortion, it paid for it. A collector who took only what was owed made nothing. His income was the margin, and the margin came out of his neighbors.

It gets worse. Collectors were frequently the only people who actually knew what the relevant statutes said. The man setting the rate was the same man profiting from it, and the man being charged had no way to check.

That is not a profession with a corruption problem. That is a profession whose business model is corruption.

Why Were Tax Collectors Hated in Israel?

Three reasons, and they stack.

The money went to the occupying power. That alone made the collector a collaborator, and in first-century Judea political betrayal and religious betrayal were not separate categories. Refusing tribute was argued by some as an obligation to God, on the grounds that paying it acknowledged a rival king.

The enrichment was at his own people’s expense, by a mechanism everyone understood.

And the work required constant contact with Gentiles, which carried ritual consequences that extended to the collector’s household.

Notice what that combination produces. He is not simply disliked. He is a traitor, a thief, and unclean, in one man, and the three reinforce each other. The Gospels list tax collectors separately from sinners even though they would fit inside the category, which tells you how sharply they stood out.

Were Tax Collectors Banned From the Synagogue?

This is the part worth slowing down for, because the popular version is stated with more confidence than the evidence carries.

The claim is familiar: a Jewish tax collector was barred from the synagogue, forbidden to testify in court, and ranked with robbers and murderers. It gets repeated in sermons and commentaries constantly.

When you follow it back, it rests substantially on Alfred Edersheim, a nineteenth-century writer, and on other compilations of similar vintage. What is better supported is narrower: tax collectors were treated as unfit to judge or to give testimony, and money known to have come from them was refused by synagogue alms boxes and by the temple treasury.

That refusal of their money is telling on its own. It is systematic religious ostracism, and it would have made ordinary communal participation difficult. But refusing a man’s donation and formally excluding him from the building are different claims, and only the first is well attested in what I have been able to check.

So the honest version is this. Tax collectors were shunned, distrusted, and treated as disqualified from any role requiring integrity. Whether a formal ban existed is a claim I would not preach without better sourcing than it usually gets.

Why Did Matthew Throw a Banquet for Jesus?

Because in that world, a shared table was the strongest statement available.

Luke 5:29 says Levi held a great banquet at his house with a large crowd of tax collectors reclining at the table. That sentence tends to get read as a nice gesture. It is not a gesture. It is the whole scene.

Meals in the first-century Middle East were where belonging was negotiated. An invitation to dine was symbolic entry into the family circle, and eating together created a shared identity that everyone present could see. The Pharisees had raised the stakes further by treating the table as a site requiring purity comparable to temple service, which made table fellowship a public statement about who counted as inside.

Now put Jesus at that table, reclining in a collaborator’s house, surrounded by his colleagues.

The complaint in Luke 5:30 is not squeamishness about company. Eating there communicated acceptance, and it carried ritual consequences for the one who ate. The objection was that a teacher had just declared, in the most legible way his culture had, that these people were not outside.

And it was Matthew’s first act after leaving the booth. His instinct on day one was to bring his old world to the man who had called him out of it.

Was Matthew the Same Person as Levi?

Yes, and the two names are not a problem.

Mark and Luke call the man at the booth Levi. Matthew’s Gospel calls him Matthew. The scene is otherwise identical, and carrying two names was ordinary in a bilingual society where Semitic and Greek names circulated together.

What is worth noticing is that the Gospel bearing the name Matthew is the one that uses that name, and it is also the one that adds the tax collector label to his entry in the apostolic list where the others leave it off. If that Gospel stands in any relation to this man, it is the version that declines to soften his résumé.

Was Matthew Autistic?

The question gets asked a lot now, and it comes from television rather than from the text.

The Gospels give Matthew almost no interior life. He sits at a booth, he is called, he gets up, he throws a banquet. There is nothing in that from which a temperament can be reconstructed, let alone a diagnosis. The neurodivergent portrayal is an acting and writing choice made for a modern audience, and the production has treated it as artistic license rather than as a claim about the man. It works as characterization. It is not evidence, and it belongs in the same column as the other invented material in The Chosen.

Did Matthew Write the Gospel of Matthew?

The earliest testimony is Papias, and what he actually said is less clear than it is usually made to sound.

Papias, quoted by Eusebius, says Matthew collected the oracles, the logia, in the Hebrew dialect. That has been read for centuries as a statement that Matthew wrote a Gospel in Hebrew or Aramaic which was later translated.

The difficulty is that our Greek Matthew does not read like a translation. It shows signs of being composed in Greek, including its use of Greek sources. So either Papias was describing something else, or the connection between what he described and the book we have is looser than the traditional reading assumes. A serious alternative takes logia to mean a collection of sayings rather than a narrative Gospel, which would make Papias a witness to a source rather than to the finished book.

Open question, argued for a long time, not settled. That is the honest label and it does not need resolving to read the Gospel.

How Did the Apostle Matthew Die?

Nobody knows, and the traditions openly contradict each other.

Later accounts send him to Ethiopia, or Persia, or Parthia. The death is martyrdom by sword in some versions. Clement of Alexandria appears to imply he died a natural death.

When the sources cannot agree on the continent or on whether the man was killed at all, the tier is speculative by definition. Any confident retelling of Matthew’s martyrdom has picked one option from a menu and dropped the menu.

Part of a series working through the Twelve one at a time. See the overview of the Twelve as a group and the Twelve Apostles timeline.

Footnotes2

1. The auction structure deserves more attention than it usually gets in preaching. A collector's take was defined as the difference between what he extracted and what he had promised upward. That is a strong incentive operating on every transaction, and it means the hostility toward collectors was a response to a real mechanism rather than a prejudice against a disliked job.
2. The refusal of tax collectors' money by synagogue alms boxes and the temple treasury is worth sitting with. Ordinarily a religious institution wants the donation. Turning it down means the money itself was understood to be tainted, which is a harder judgment than disapproving of the man.

Sources

D. A. Hagner, "Tax Collector," in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, revised edition, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 1979-1988), 4:742. Supports the bidding mechanism, the quota-and-surplus structure, the placement of collectors at tolls and borders, and the three-part account of why they were despised.

Otto Michel, "telones," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Supports the point that collectors were often the only parties who knew the applicable statutes.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008). Supports the reading of table fellowship and of the Levi banquet as a public act rather than a courtesy. In print from IVP Academic.

Alfred Edersheim, and John M'Clintock and James Strong, "Publican," in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (Harper, 1894), 8:770. Cited here as the source of the synagogue-exclusion claim rather than as confirmation of it. The narrower point about refused alms and disqualification from testimony is better supported. Out of copyright and in the public domain.

Where the sourcing stops: the observation that Matthew's Gospel is the one keeping the tax collector label in the apostolic list is my own reading of the text. The judgment that the formal synagogue ban is under-sourced is my own conclusion from following the claim back to its usual citations, and I would revise it if a first-century primary text turned up.