Red-Letter Day
Apostle & Evangelist
September 21
also known as Matthew, St. Matthew, Levi
Matthew, called Levi in Mark and Luke, was a Galilean tax collector summoned by Jesus from his customs booth and numbered among the Twelve Apostles. The universal early tradition, attested by Papias around 130 and by Irenaeus around 180, records that he composed a Gospel in Hebrew for Jewish believers before carrying the apostolic preaching to other peoples. The church remembers him on September 21 as the apostle who put the Lord's deeds and sayings into writing for the household of Israel and, through that writing, for the world.
Matthew was sitting at the tax booth when Jesus walked past. A tax collector in Capernaum did not work for his own people. He worked for the occupying power, taking a percentage off the top of what his neighbors carried in from the lake and the road, and he was hated for it. In the English Standard Version the call is told in a single sentence: "As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he rose and followed him."
That night Matthew threw a feast at his own house and filled it with the kind of people a respectable rabbi was not supposed to eat with, his fellow publicans and others the Pharisees called sinners, and Jesus sat down at the table with them. The Pharisees asked the disciples why their master would do such a thing, and Jesus answered that the whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. He had not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance. Matthew, the man who had spent his working life writing down what other people owed, watched his own debt forgiven across that table.
He was numbered among the Twelve, and he walked with the Lord through the Galilean ministry, the journey to Jerusalem, the cross, and the empty tomb. After Pentecost the early church remembered him as the apostle to the Hebrews, the one who stayed longest with the synagogue communities of Judea and put the gospel into writing for them in their own tongue before the Twelve were scattered to other nations. Clement of Alexandria, writing around the year 200, preserved a small personal detail: that Matthew lived ascetically, on seeds and nuts and vegetables, in the manner of the prophets. When he finally left Judea, the tradition carried him east, variously to Ethiopia, to Persia, to Parthia, to Pontus, where he preached the kingdom and was at last killed for it, by sword or by spear, the medieval accounts disagree. What the whole church has held in common is the Gospel he left behind, and the witness that the converted tax collector, of all the Twelve, was the one entrusted to keep the Lord's accounts.
How we know. The historical record for Matthew the man is thin in the way the record for most of the Twelve is thin: a handful of New Testament notices, a small cluster of patristic statements about his Gospel, and a much larger body of later legend. The earliest external witness is Papias of Hierapolis, writing around the year 130, whose lost work Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord is preserved in fragments by Eusebius of Caesarea in Ecclesiastical History 3.39. The next is Irenaeus of Lyons, around 180, in Against Heresies 3.1.1. Both are quoted by Eusebius himself in EH 3.24 and 6.25, alongside Origen and others, and Eusebius is the single most important narrative source for the apostolic geography. Clement of Alexandria, around 200, preserves the only personal-character note (Stromateis 4). Beyond these the tradition becomes medieval: passion accounts, acta, breviary lections. The modern critical reader reads the patristic witnesses first and the medieval acta as the record of how later centuries received and elaborated the apostolic memory.
On the Gospel itself the early voice is unanimous. Papias, in McGiffert's translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, reports: "So then Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted them as he was able." Irenaeus, in the Roberts and Donaldson rendering in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, places the composition geographically and chronologically: "Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church." Eusebius, again in McGiffert, gives the mission-and-writing as a single arc: "For Matthew, who had at first preached to the Hebrews, when he was about to go to other peoples, committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and thus compensated those whom he was obliged to leave for the loss of his presence." That Eusebian frame, written gospel as substitute for bodily apostolic presence, is the lens through which the patristic church understood all four evangelists, and it is why the church reads the Gospels at the Eucharist as the apostles' own continuing voice.
The church's reading holds the patristic witness as the witness. Matthew the apostle wrote his Gospel in Hebrew for Jewish believers, and the church received that Gospel as his and has read it as his through every century of its life; the Greek text that the manuscript tradition inherited carries the apostle's writing into the churches that did not have Hebrew. A critical hypothesis advanced since the late nineteenth century has proposed the opposite order, that the Greek Matthew drew on the Gospel of Mark and on a now-lost sayings source, and reads the patristic notices of a Hebrew original as testimony either to a separate Jewish-Christian gospel or to a now-lost Semitic stratum (the logia Papias names). The church's reading remains the church's; the critical reversal is a modern hypothesis, named for what it is.
Eusebius preserves one further notice that has shaped the eastern tradition. In EH 5.10 he reports that the second-century Alexandrian teacher Pantaenus traveled as far as India and found there Christians already in possession of Matthew's Gospel in Hebrew letters, said to have been left with them by the apostle Bartholomew. The historical detail behind the story is debated, but its early date makes it a load-bearing witness to the conviction that Matthew's Gospel was carried east as well as west almost from the beginning. The geography of Matthew's own later mission, by contrast, is preserved only in much later sources: Ethiopia, Persia, Parthia, and Pontus all appear in medieval accounts, and the manner of his death, by sword or by spear, varies with the source. The church holds him as a martyr; the specific scene cannot be pinned to the apostolic generation with the evidence we have.
September 21 has been Matthew's feast in the Western calendar since the early Middle Ages; the East keeps him on November 16. The liturgical color is red, the color the church wears for an apostle and martyr. Matthew is patron of tax collectors, accountants, bookkeepers, bankers, customs officers, and security guards, and of the cities of Salerno, where his relics rest, and Asti. Of the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 he is the winged man, because his Gospel opens with the human genealogy of Christ; the pairing is fixed by Irenaeus in Against Heresies 3.11.8 and by Jerome in his prologue on Matthew, and from there it becomes the standard medieval tetramorph of the four evangelists, with Mark the lion, Luke the ox, and John the eagle. He is depicted as an evangelist with a book or codex, often with an angel at his shoulder dictating, and frequently with a money bag or set of scales recalling the call at the receipt of custom. His body was translated to the Cathedral of San Matteo in Salerno in 954 and rests there still; an arm relic is venerated at Notre-Dame in Paris.
Hymnody. William Walsham How's We give thee but thine own is widely sung on the feast in Anglican use, the hymn of the converted publican who has learned what stewardship means. The proper Vespers hymn in the Roman tradition is Mátthæe, sancte, bíne tu.
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The Gospel according to Matthew(Greek (universal early tradition: Hebrew or Aramaic original, now lost), first century; patristic tradition places composition before Matthew left Judea, c. 50-65)
Recommended: English Standard Version (Crossway)
The Gospel itself, the first book of the New Testament. Universal early tradition attributes it to the apostle Matthew, the converted tax collector; modern critical scholarship more often treats the canonical Greek text as composed by an anonymous Jewish-Christian writer working from Mark and a sayings source, with the apostle's name preserved as the witness behind the Matthean tradition. The church reads it as the apostolic witness it has always claimed to be.
Other translations: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition
Public domain: King James Version (Wikisource), Bible Gateway (multiple translations)
Ecclesiastical History (with the Papias fragment on Matthew at 3.39 and the order of the Gospels at 3.24)(Greek, c. 324)
Recommended: Eusebius, The History of the Church, tr. G. A. Williamson, rev. Andrew Louth (Penguin Classics)
The single most important narrative source for early Christian memory of the apostles. Eusebius preserves the Papias fragment (c. 130, the oldest surviving statement on Matthew's Gospel), the Irenaeus and Origen testimonies, and his own framing of Matthew as the apostle who first preached to the Hebrews and then committed his Gospel to writing as he prepared to depart for other peoples. Read EH 3.24 and 3.39 first; book 5.10 on Pantaenus and the Hebrew Matthew in India is the load-bearing source for the early eastern tradition.
Other translations: Paul L. Maier, Eusebius: The Church History (Kregel, with commentary)
Public domain: CCEL: McGiffert translation (NPNF series 2, vol. 1), Papias fragment on Matthew (EH 3.39), Order of the Gospels (EH 3.24)
Against Heresies, Book 3 (on the fourfold Gospel and the four living creatures)(Greek (preserved primarily in Latin translation), c. 180)
Recommended: Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, tr. Dominic J. Unger, ACW (Paulist / Newman, multivolume)
Earliest surviving witness that Matthew issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome (3.1.1). Book 3.11.8 is also where the four-evangelists-to-four-living-creatures pairing is fixed for the patristic and medieval church, with Matthew the winged man.
Public domain: CCEL: Roberts-Donaldson translation (ANF vol. 1), Book 3
Matthew for Everyone (2 volumes)(English, 2004)
The lay-accessible entry point. Wright walks the reader through Matthew chapter by chapter in short, prayable sections, in the voice of a believing scholar speaking to a thoughtful parishioner. Part 2 (chs 16-28) continues the same treatment through the Passion and resurrection (ASIN 0664227872). The book Commontide would put first in a reader's hand who wanted to read Matthew with company.
The Gospel of Matthew (New International Commentary on the New Testament)(English, 2007)
Recommended: R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (NICNT, Eerdmans 2007)
The watershed believing-academic commentary in English on the First Gospel. France writes as a scholar of the historical Jesus who takes the apostolic witness seriously, and the volume has become the field's default starting point for pastors and serious readers who want one substantial book on Matthew that respects both the Gospel's theological claim and its historical setting.
Further reading. Donald Hagner, Matthew (Word Biblical Commentary, 2 volumes, 1993-1995), is the deeper conservative believing commentary for those who want fuller exegetical apparatus past France's NICNT volume; widely used in evangelical seminaries; check WorldCat for library copies. For the wider scholarly conversation, Ulrich Luz's Matthew: A Commentary (Hermeneia, 3 volumes, Fortress 2001-2007) is the major critical commentary of the last generation, written from a confessional Reformed-Lutheran standpoint and unusually attentive to the Gospel's reception history through the medieval and Reformation periods; standard in graduate seminars. Dale C. Allison's Studies in Matthew: Interpretation Past and Present (Baker Academic, 2005) collects the leading American critical Matthew scholar's essays on structure, theology, and reception.
Online resources. The full Greek text of Matthew is available free at the SBL Greek New Testament and in parallel with English translations at Bible Gateway. Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, Irenaeus's Against Heresies, and Clement's Stromateis are all hosted in full English translation at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, with the Papias fragment on Matthew at EH 3.39 in the NPNF series.
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Lord Jesus, you called Matthew from collecting taxes to become your apostle and evangelist: Grant us the grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches, that we may follow you as he did and proclaim to the world around us the good news of your salvation; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.