Writers of the Bible
Matthew
1st century AD (Gospel c. AD 55–65) · Tax collector · one of the Twelve · scribe of the kingdom · gospel writer
Greek Ματθαῖος (Matthaios), from Hebrew מַתִּתְיָהוּ (Mattityahu) — "gift of the LORD"; the other gospels also call him Levi (Mark 2:14)
The call was two words — "Follow me" — and the man who kept Rome's toll ledgers got up, left the booth forever, and spent the rest of his life keeping the record of a King.
The Books They Wrote (1)
Like all four gospels the text itself is anonymous; the attribution rests on unanimous early testimony — around AD 110 Papias wrote that "Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language," and no early manuscript title or church father ever names anyone else. The tradition fits: a customs official on Capernaum's trade road was one of the few men in Galilee guaranteed to be literate, trained in Greek, and drilled in keeping exact records. Written most likely in the AD 50s–60s for Jewish readers, to prove from their own Scriptures that Jesus is the Messiah.
Life Story
The man in the tollbooth
Capernaum sat on the Via Maris, the great coastal road that carried Damascus caravans down toward the Mediterranean, and where a trade road crossed Herod Antipas's border, Rome's franchise-holders set a customs booth. In it sat Levi son of Alphaeus, assessing fish catches, grain carts and caravan loads — a tax collector. In first-century Galilee no occupation cost a man more: he had bought the right to collect tolls for the occupiers and lived on whatever margin he could squeeze, so his neighbors said "tax collectors and sinners" in a single breath, the synagogue barred him, and no court would accept his testimony. He was wealthy, and he was alone. Yet the despised booth was also a school. A customs official on an international road had to read and write, work in Greek as well as Aramaic, and keep exact, defensible records every working day — some scholars note that men of his trade even used a form of shorthand. In all Galilee, hardly anyone was better trained to take down and preserve a teacher's words. Jesus walked past the fishermen's nets and called them; then he walked up to the one man at the crossroads with a pen in his hand.
Follow me
Matthew records his own conversion in a single verse: "As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. 'Follow me,' he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him" (Matthew 9:9). It is the shortest call in the Bible, and among the most costly. Peter and Andrew could always go back to their boats — after the resurrection, for one night, they did. A tax franchise abandoned was gone forever; the moment Matthew stood up, the booth, the income and the old life closed behind him like a door. What he did next tells you what he had found. Luke records that Levi held a great banquet at his house, and Matthew's own account says who filled it: "many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples" (9:10) — the only crowd that would have come, his old world seated around his new Lord at his own table. When the Pharisees demanded to know why, Jesus answered over the meal: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick… For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners" (9:12–13). Matthew set that sentence into his gospel like a signature: it was the sentence that had saved him.
The scribe of the kingdom
For three years he walked with Jesus as one of the Twelve — and, it seems, kept listening like a record-keeper. The gospel that bears his name is the great bridge between the testaments: it quotes the Old Testament some sixty times, more than any other gospel, and again and again strikes the same bell — "this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet." He gathered Jesus' teaching into five great discourses — the Sermon on the Mount, the mission charge, the parables of the kingdom, life in the community, and the end of the age — an architecture Jewish readers would feel in their bones, echoing the five books of Moses. Even the opening genealogy is a ledger-keeper's work, balanced in three sets of fourteen generations. And there is a signature humility in the book. Mark and Luke, telling the story of his call, courteously use his other name, Levi. Matthew names himself — and in the roll of the apostles, his gospel alone attaches the old shame to his own name: "Matthew the tax collector" (10:3). He never got over the wonder that Jesus had wanted him. Perhaps he heard himself in one of the Lord's sayings he preserved: "every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old" (13:52).
To his own people first, then beyond
Of Matthew's later years the New Testament says nothing after the upper room of Acts 1, and the early church fills the silence only in outline. The oldest testimony agrees on the shape of his ministry: he preached first to his own people — Irenaeus says he "issued a gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect" — and later carried the message abroad. Where, the traditions differ: Ethiopia in some accounts, Persia or Parthia in others. Most traditions say he died a martyr, though the accounts of how vary so widely that none can be pressed with confidence, and a few remember him dying in peace. All of it is tradition, and honesty says so. What is certain is the record he left. The church placed his gospel first in the New Testament — the hinge on which the Bible turns from promise to fulfillment — and for centuries it was the most quoted, most preached, most copied book in Christendom. The tax collector whom Capernaum's synagogue would not admit ended up teaching the nations. His booth stood at the crossroads of the Via Maris; his book stands at the crossroads of the testaments.
Key Verse · Matthew 9:9
“As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. "Follow me," he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.”
Pointing to Christ
The whole gospel is the argument: Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah the Old Testament promised. Matthew opens with a name from Isaiah — Immanuel, "God with us" — and closes with the risen King's own voice completing it: "surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (28:20). Between those brackets, every fulfillment formula, every discourse, every deed is laid out like entries in a ledger proving one accounting: prophecy made, prophecy kept. And the ledger-keeper is himself part of the proof — the man whose columns once recorded tolls squeezed from his neighbors spent his last decades recording the words of the King who had stopped at his booth and said, "Follow me."
Questions People Ask
Why would Jewish readers trust a gospel written by a tax collector?
On paper it is the worst possible byline — and that is part of the message. Matthew's gospel proves its Jewish credentials on every page: the genealogy from Abraham, some sixty Old Testament citations, the constant refrain of prophecy fulfilled; whatever his old trade, no reader could doubt that this writer knew the Scriptures. Deeper still, the byline itself preaches. A book announcing that the kingdom of heaven is open to sinners arrives written by the most notorious kind of sinner Galilee knew — its very existence demonstrates its thesis. The early church never treated his past as an embarrassment; it treated it as evidence.
Did Matthew copy from Mark?
The three synoptic gospels share a great deal of material, much of it nearly word for word, and both church tradition and modern scholarship have long discussed the order of writing — most scholars today think Mark wrote first and Matthew drew on him, while older tradition, back to Augustine, put Matthew first. Neither answer threatens inspiration. Luke opens his gospel by saying plainly that he worked from earlier accounts and eyewitness testimony (Luke 1:1–3) — the Spirit's inspiration worked through honest research and shared sources, not around them. And if Matthew did use Mark, he was leaning on Peter's preaching, which Mark preserved — one apostle gladly building with another's eyewitness stone.
Why does Matthew begin with a genealogy?
Because for his first readers it was the most exciting page in the book. A Jewish audience asking "Is Jesus the Messiah?" needed one thing established before miracles or sermons: legal descent from Abraham and from David, the two men to whom the promises were made. Matthew 1 is the title deed. And it carries subversive grace from the first lines — the tidy list deliberately includes Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and "Uriah's wife": Gentiles, scandals, outsiders written into the Messiah's own family tree by a converted outsider. The genealogy is not a delay before the gospel starts; it is the gospel starting.
How did Matthew die?
Nobody knows for certain. After Acts 1:13 the New Testament never mentions him again, and the early traditions, while agreeing that he preached first to the Hebrews and later abroad, scatter on the ending — Ethiopia in some tellings, Persia in others; death by sword, by fire, or in a few accounts in peace. Most traditions count him a martyr, and the church has honored him as one, but no account is early or consistent enough to be pressed as history. What the earliest witnesses do agree on is the part that matters: he spent his remaining decades doing exactly what his booth had trained him to do — putting the King's words into permanent form.