The Tax Collector Called from the Toll Booth

Matthew is listed among the twelve in all four Gospels. In the Gospel that bears his name he is called Matthew and identified as a tax collector, summoned from his toll booth with a single word and giving a feast at which Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners, to the scandal of the pious. The Gospels of Mark and Luke tell the same call story but name the man Levi, and the church early identified the two as one person under two names.

The detail carries weight in its setting. A tax or toll collector in Roman Galilee was a Jew working the customs of a foreign power, handling Gentile coin, widely despised as both a collaborator and a cheat. That Jesus should call such a man, and that the movement should remember one of the twelve as having been one, is the kind of detail a tradition is unlikely to have invented and it fits the Gospels' insistence that the call went to the disreputable.

Beyond the call and the lists, the New Testament tells us nothing of what Matthew did or where he went. His later fame rests instead on a book, and on an ancient claim about who wrote it.