Matthew the Apostle

Life and Ministry

Matthew was a tax collector seated at the customs post in Capernaum when Jesus called him with the words Follow me, and he rose, left everything, and followed (Luke 5:27-28). Mark and Luke call him Levi, son of Alphaeus; the First Gospel itself names him Matthew at the same scene, and the apostolic lists place him among the Twelve. He is uniformly identified by the earliest church writers as the author or compiler of the Gospel that bears his name, originally circulated, Papias says, as a collection of the sayings of the Lord in the Hebrew dialect. After Pentecost he is said by Eusebius and Clement of Alexandria to have preached for a time among the Hebrews of Judea before traveling abroad. The destinations recorded by later tradition vary — Ethiopia, Persia, Parthia, the Pontic coast — reflecting the geographic reach of early Syrian and Eastern Christian memory.

Circumstances of Death

The early tradition is uncertain on the manner of Matthew's death. Clement of Alexandria notes the silence of the apostolic generation about it and seems to imply a natural end. Later martyrologies, both Eastern and Western, fix the location at the royal city of Naddaver in Ethiopia (or in Parthia by another stream) and record his death as either spearing while at the altar or beheading after he denounced an attempted forced marriage by the king to a consecrated virgin. The historical kernel is the consistent ancient memory that Matthew preached outside the Roman world and that he was killed for his preaching; the specifics are pious filling-out of a witness whose original details were lost.

Legacy

Matthew's enduring monument is his Gospel — the most quoted New Testament book in the early church, the bridge between the Hebrew prophets and the apostolic kerygma, and the source of the Sermon on the Mount and the Great Commission. His witness is that the man Christ called from a despised trade became the evangelist whose words have catechized more souls than any uninspired writer in history. The tax collector who was hated for taking money became the apostle through whom Christ took back countless hearts. The pen of a publican became a pen of fire.