Saint Matthew the Apostle: The Tax Collector at the Customs Post

The eighth installment in a series on the Twelve Apostles.

Every apostle in this series so far has come to us from the fishing boats and villages of Galilee trailing some distinguishing mark — Peter his primacy, Andrew his first-called priority, John the beloved discipleship, Thomas the doubt he turned into the New Testament’s highest confession. Matthew’s mark is less flattering and more interesting: he is the only member of the Twelve whose résumé the Gospels record with something like embarrassment. He was sitting at a customs post when Jesus found him. “As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post. He said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.”⁠¹

That single verse — twenty-two words in the NABRE — generated one of the most beloved paintings in Western art, the episcopal motto of the current pontificate’s predecessor-in-interest, and a sixteen-year-old Argentine’s vocation to the priesthood. When Pope Francis was asked, months into his pontificate, who Jorge Bergoglio was, he answered from Caravaggio’s canvas of this scene: “That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew.”⁠²

This post examines the man behind the verse with the same rules the rest of this series has used: the New Testament evidence first, read closely; then the second-century witnesses; then the legends, clearly labeled as legends; and the Catholic devotional tradition last, presented as what it is — the Church’s long meditation on a sinner’s call — rather than smuggled in as history. Matthew turns out to be a harder historical subject than his fame suggests. The earliest traditions cannot agree on whether he and “Levi” are the same man, where he preached, or even whether he died a martyr. What they agree on completely is why he matters: he is the New Testament’s standing proof that no one is disqualified.

Matthew in the New Testament

The call at the customs post

The scene is told three times in the Synoptic Gospels, in nearly identical words, with one glaring difference — the man’s name. In the First Gospel, Jesus sees “a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post” and says “Follow me”; Matthew rises and follows.⁠³ In Mark, the man at the customs post is “Levi, son of Alphaeus.”⁠⁴ In Luke, he is “a tax collector named Levi,” and Luke alone adds two details: that he left “everything” behind, and that he then threw Jesus “a great banquet” in his house — a detail suggesting the man had means.⁠⁵

In all three accounts, what follows the call is the meal — and the scandal. Tax collectors and sinners recline at table with Jesus; the Pharisees demand of his disciples why their teacher eats with such people; and Jesus answers with the sentence that the Church has read at Matthew’s feast for centuries: “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”⁠⁶ The quotation is Hosea 6:6, and its placement here matters: the call of the tax collector is the Gospel’s enacted commentary on it. The Church still puts Matthew 9:13 in Matthew’s mouth liturgically — it is the Communion Antiphon of his feast.⁠⁷

What a tax collector in Capernaum actually was

The English word “publican,” inherited from the King James Version, misleads. The Roman publicani were wealthy contractors who farmed provincial taxes for the Roman state; the man at the Capernaum tollbooth was something much smaller. The Greek word is telōnēs — a toll or customs collector — and the standard modern study, John R. Donahue’s, concludes that the telōnai of the Gospels were “minor functionaries fulfilling the orders of higher officials,” collecting tolls and duties on goods in transit.⁠⁸ And in Galilee in the late 20s, those tolls did not even flow to Rome directly. Galilee was governed not by a Roman prefect but by the tetrarch Herod Antipas; Capernaum sat near the frontier between Antipas’s territory and his brother Philip’s, astride the great trade road running between Damascus and the Mediterranean coast that later generations called the Via Maris. A customs man at Capernaum taxed the goods crossing that border for the tetrarch’s treasury.⁠⁹

None of which made the trade respectable. The rabbinic literature — compiled later, but reflecting attitudes with deep roots — classes tax collectors with murderers and robbers: the Mishnah permits a man to lie under vow to “murderers, robbers, and tax collectors” to protect his property, and the Talmud disqualifies tax collectors as witnesses in court.⁠¹⁰ E. P. Sanders, in his classic study of Jesus’ milieu, argued that the “sinners” of the Gospel meal scenes are not the merely lax but the genuinely wicked — people in despised and dishonest trades — and that what scandalized Jesus’ critics was precisely his welcome of such people into the kingdom without the standard mechanisms of restitution first.⁠¹¹ John Chrysostom, preaching on the call in the fourth century, did not soften the point: the tax collector’s trade was “a mode of gain whereof no fair account could be given, a shameless traffic, a robbery under cloak of law: yet nevertheless He who uttered the call was ashamed of none of these things.”⁠¹²

Two inferences from the trade are worth registering, both cautiously. First, a border customs official almost certainly kept records — which means Matthew was numerate and at least functionally literate, plausibly in more than one language. Apologists have long built on this the argument that Matthew was the natural bookkeeper of the Twelve, the one man among the fishermen who worked with a pen. The inference is reasonable but should not be overworked; a village tollbooth is not a scriptorium.⁠¹³ Second, Luke’s “great banquet” implies real money. The man who walked away from the Capernaum tollbooth walked away from more than the fishermen left in their nets.

The four apostle lists

Matthew appears in all four New Testament lists of the Twelve — Matthew 10:2–4, Mark 3:16–19, Luke 6:14–16, Acts 1:13 — always in the second group of four, the middle tier of the Twelve.⁠¹⁴ But the First Gospel’s list differs from the others in two small, pointed ways. It is the only list that attaches an epithet to his name: “Thomas and Matthew the tax collector.”⁠¹⁵ And where Mark and Luke list Matthew before Thomas, the First Gospel reverses the order, placing Matthew after Thomas. The tradition has long read both details devotionally: the Gospel that bears Matthew’s name is the one that will not let the reader forget what he was. Chrysostom admired “the self-denial of the evangelist, how he disguises not his own former life, but adds even his name, when the others had concealed him under another appellation.”⁠¹⁶ Modern critics read the same details as the redactor’s linkage device — the epithet ties the list back to the call scene of the previous chapter. Both readings fit the evidence; the reader should know both exist.

Whatever else is true, Richard Bauckham has shown that the lists themselves are remarkably careful artifacts — preserved, he argues, with “great care to preserve precisely the way they were known in their own milieu during the ministry of Jesus and in the early Jerusalem church.”⁠¹⁷ The Twelve were remembered as a definite, named body of men. Matthew of Capernaum is locked into that earliest memory.

After Acts 1:13: the silence

Matthew’s last appearance in the New Testament is in the upper room between the Ascension and Pentecost: “Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.”⁠¹⁸ After that verse he is never mentioned individually again — not in Acts, not in the epistles, not in Revelation. As with Bartholomew and Philip before him in this series, the silence is total.

One early tradition fills the first stretch of that silence collectively rather than individually. Clement of Alexandria, quoting the lost second-century Preaching of Peter, records a saying of the Lord to the apostles: “If any one of Israel then, wishes to repent, and by my name to believe in God, his sins shall be forgiven him, after twelve years. Go forth into the world, that no one may say, We have not heard.”⁠¹⁹ The tradition that the apostles remained in or around Jerusalem for roughly twelve years before dispersing to their mission fields appears in this and other early texts. If it preserves anything historical, Matthew remained part of the Jerusalem apostolic college into the 40s. Where he went afterward is a question the sources answer in cheerful contradiction of one another — we will come to it. But first, the harder question: who was he?

The Matthew/Levi Question

The traditional identification

The Church has read Matthew and Levi as one man with two names since at least the fourth century, and the reading is natural. The call scenes are verbally near-identical — same customs post, same “Follow me,” same instant rising, same meal with tax collectors and sinners following. No Gospel ever lists a “Levi” among the Twelve; the First Gospel’s list tags Matthew, alone of the apostles, as “the tax collector,” apparently pointing the reader back to the man called at the tollbooth a chapter earlier. Jerome states the identification as settled fact: “Matthew, also called Levi, apostle and aforetimes publican.”⁠²⁰ In the Catena Aurea, Thomas Aquinas assembles Jerome’s elegant explanation of the divergent names: “The other Evangelists from respect to Matthew have not called him by his common name, but say here, Levi, for he had both names. Matthew himself… calls himself both Matthew and Publican, to shew the readers that none need despair of salvation who turn to better things, seeing he from a Publican became an Apostle.”⁠²¹

Double names were genuinely common among first-century Palestinian Jews — Simon/Peter, Saul/Paul, Thomas/Didymus, Joseph/Barnabas — and the conservative commentator Donald Hagner puts the traditional case at its strongest: it “is very improbable that the evangelist could have gotten away with the substitution of Matthew for Levi were they not in reality the same person.”⁠²² The First Gospel was read in churches that knew who the apostles were; a fabricated identification, the argument runs, would not have survived.

The case against

The trouble is that the standard examples of double names are not parallel. Nearly every attested case pairs a Semitic name with a Greek or Latin name (Saul/Paul), or a name with a nickname (Simon/Cephas, “Rock”). Matthew and Levi are both common Semitic personal names — and that combination, Richard Bauckham has argued from Tal Ilan’s onomastic database of Palestinian Jewish names, is virtually unattested: “if Matthew and Levi were the same person, we should be confronted with the virtually unparalleled phenomenon of a Palestinian Jew bearing two common Semitic personal names.”⁠²³ Matthew was the ninth most popular male name in the surviving record; Levi the seventeenth. A man might carry one of each kind of name; he did not ordinarily carry two of the same kind.

The harmonizing fallback — that “Matthew” was a new name Jesus gave Levi at his call, on the model of Simon becoming Peter — has the disadvantage that no source says so. No canonical or non-canonical text records a renaming; Mark, who carefully notes that Jesus “gave the name Peter” to Simon, says nothing of the kind about Levi.⁠²⁴

Bauckham’s own proposal is that the First Evangelist, knowing the apostle Matthew had been a tax collector but possessing no call story for him, appropriated Mark’s call of Levi and changed the name — borrowing, as he puts it, only as much of Mark’s story as he needed. He finds a fingerprint of the borrowing in the meal scene: Mark’s wording naturally suggests the meal took place in Levi’s house, while the First Gospel says only “in the house.”⁠²⁵ On this reading Matthew and Levi were two different tax collectors, and the call scene migrated from one to the other under the evangelist’s hand.

There are also small textual curiosities on the edges of the question. Some manuscripts of Mark 2:14 read “James the son of Alphaeus” instead of “Levi” at the customs post — a scribal harmonization, the text critics judge, prompted by the fact that Mark’s apostle list contains a “James the son of Alphaeus” but no Levi. And Origen, who in one work treats Matthew/Levi as a Saul/Paul-style double name, in another flatly states that Levi was not among the Twelve except in some manuscripts of Mark.⁠²⁶ Even more strikingly, the second-century writer Heracleon — in a passage we will meet again when we come to the martyrdom question — lists “Matthew, Philip, Thomas, Levi” side by side, as apparently distinct men.⁠²⁷ The ancient record is simply not unanimous.

What the Catholic reader should make of it

Nothing doctrinal hangs on the identification. The Church’s liturgy celebrates Matthew the apostle and evangelist; the current Roman Martyrology’s entry for September 21 describes him as the man “called Levi” who left the tax office at Jesus’ call — the traditional identification — and a Catholic is on perfectly safe ground holding it.⁠²⁸ The identification was the common property of the Fathers, it remains the most economical reading of the epithet in Matthew 10:3, and Bauckham’s onomastic argument, though serious, is an argument from statistical pattern, not a demonstration. What the Catholic reader should not do is treat the question as closed when honest scholarship treats it as open — this series has made a habit of saying so plainly, and the habit matters more than any single conclusion. The faith does not need Matthew and Levi to be the same man. It needs what every version of the story preserves: that Jesus called a tax collector, and the tax collector got up.

Did Matthew Write the First Gospel?

A full treatment of the Gospel’s composition belongs to this site’s post on the Gospel of Matthew; here the question is narrower — what the earliest external witnesses say about the apostle as an author, because those witnesses are also our earliest post-biblical traditions about the man himself.

Papias and the logia

The oldest surviving statement about Matthew as a writer comes from Papias of Hierapolis, writing in the early second century, preserved by Eusebius: “So then Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted them as he was able.”⁠²⁹ Every word of that sentence has generated a literature. “The oracles” (ta logia) may mean a full Gospel, a collection of Jesus’ sayings, or something else; “in the Hebrew language” (Hebraidi dialektō) is traditionally read as Hebrew or Aramaic, though a significant modern line of interpretation, associated with Josef Kürzinger, takes it to mean “in a Hebrew style” of arrangement; and Eusebius has visibly torn the sentence from its original context, so we cannot even be sure what Papias said around it.⁠³⁰ What the sentence establishes beyond doubt is that within living memory of the apostolic generation, the apostle Matthew was remembered as a writer — the tax collector with the pen.

The second-century chorus

The tradition hardens quickly. Irenaeus of Lyons, around 180: “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.”⁠³¹ Origen, in the early third century, as quoted by Eusebius: “the first was written by Matthew, who was once a publican, but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, and it was prepared for the converts from Judaism, and published in the Hebrew language.”⁠³² Eusebius himself, in the fourth century, adds the only motive the tradition ever supplies: “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.”⁠³³

Jerome, at the end of the fourth century, reports that the Hebrew original still existed in his day — “preserved until the present day in the library at Caesarea which Pamphilus so diligently gathered” — and that the Nazarene Christians of Beroea in Syria used a copy.⁠³⁴ A century earlier, Eusebius had recorded the most romantic version of the tradition: when the philosopher-missionary Pantaenus traveled to “India” in the late second century, he reportedly found Christians already in possession of “the Gospel according to Matthew… in the Hebrew language,” left behind by the apostle Bartholomew.⁠³⁵

The modern problem

The unanimous patristic testimony — Matthew wrote, and wrote in Hebrew — collides with a stubborn feature of the Greek Gospel we possess: it does not read like a translation, and it visibly depends on the Greek text of Mark. That is the crux of the modern authorship debate, and it is why most contemporary scholars, including most Catholic scholars, regard the canonical Greek Matthew as the work of a later Jewish-Christian author writing in the apostle’s tradition rather than the apostle’s own pen. Raymond Brown’s standard Catholic introduction takes this view; Ulrich Luz, the great Matthean commentator, holds it too, while candidly conceding that the Gospel must have carried Matthew’s name remarkably early — “That leaves little time for ascribing to the apostle an originally anonymous book… I mention this difficulty because it is scarcely ever mentioned,” he writes, with unusual honesty about his own position’s weak point.⁠³⁶ The most respectful modern treatment of the patristic evidence, the Davies–Allison commentary, pauses over the fact that Greek-educated Fathers like Clement and Origen accepted the translation tradition without apparent difficulty: “should not the acceptance of Matthew as a translation by Greeks as eminent as Clement and Origen give pause?”⁠³⁷ And scholars like R. T. France have continued to hold that the Gospel’s character makes someone like the apostle as likely a candidate as any.⁠³⁸

Two things can be held together honestly. The unanimous early tradition connects the apostle Matthew to a written Gospel, and no rival author was ever proposed by anyone in antiquity. And the Greek Gospel as we have it is hard to square with the simplest form of that tradition. Whether the apostle stands behind the Gospel as its author, its source, or the founding teacher of the community that produced it, the early Church was certain the First Gospel’s voice was, in some real sense, the tax collector’s — and as Benedict XVI put it, “in the Greek Gospel that we possess we still continue to hear, in a certain way, the persuasive voice of the publican Matthew, who, having become an Apostle, continues to proclaim God’s saving mercy to us.”⁠³⁹ Jerome’s library copy, incidentally, is no longer regarded as evidence for the original: most modern scholars judge that what the Nazarenes of Beroea used — and possibly what the Caesarea library held — was a later Jewish-Christian gospel, not the apostle’s autograph.⁠⁴⁰

Mission and Death: The Tangle of Traditions

If the reader has followed this series from the beginning, the shape of what follows will be familiar from the posts on Thomas, Philip, and Bartholomew: a thin, early, geographically vague layer of testimony; a thick, late, novelistic layer of legend; and a Church that has learned to hold the two apart. Matthew’s case is the most tangled of all, because even the early layer disagrees with itself.

The earliest evidence points away from martyrdom

Start with the witness almost nobody quotes from the pulpit. Around the middle of the second century, the Valentinian teacher Heracleon — commenting on confession and martyrdom — was quoted by Clement of Alexandria, who preserved his words without contradicting them on the point of fact: “all the saved have confessed with the confession made by the voice, and departed. Of whom are Matthew, Philip, Thomas, Levi, and many others.”⁠⁴¹ Heracleon’s argument is that confession “before the authorities” — the martyr’s confession — is not required of all the saved; and his examples of saved men who confessed by life and voice rather than before magistrates are apostles: Matthew, Philip, Thomas. The text as transmitted is awkward, and the standard scholarly reading takes the passage to imply these apostles were not martyred — an inference, it should be said plainly, not an explicit statement that Matthew died in his bed. But it is the earliest surviving testimony bearing on Matthew’s death, it was repeated without protest by one of the most learned Christians of the second century, and it cuts against the later legend. Readers of the Philip post have met this passage before; it is load-bearing for three apostles at once.

A second early witness agrees in substance. The Byzantine-era list that circulates under the name of Hippolytus — pseudonymous, but preserving older tradition — gives Matthew this ending: “And Matthew wrote the Gospel in the Hebrew tongue, and published it at Jerusalem, and fell asleep at Hierees, a town of Parthia.”⁠⁴² “Fell asleep” is the ancient Christian euphemism for a peaceful death. No flames, no sword, no Ethiopia — a natural death in Parthia.

Ethiopia, Parthia, Persia, Macedonia: who says what

The mission-field traditions are best laid out source by source, because smoothing them into one narrative — as the older hagiography did — misrepresents the evidence.

The earliest apostolic-allotment list, which Eusebius quotes from Origen, assigns Parthia to Thomas, Scythia to Andrew, and Asia to John — and does not mention Matthew at all.⁠⁴³ Eusebius himself says only that Matthew “preached to the Hebrews” and then went “to other peoples,” unspecified. The explicit “Matthew → Ethiopia” assignment first appears in a church historian at the start of the fifth century, in Rufinus of Aquileia’s continuation of Eusebius, as the preamble to his story of the fourth-century evangelization of Aksum; Socrates Scholasticus repeats Rufinus nearly word for word a generation later: “When the apostles went forth by lot among the nations, Thomas received the apostleship of the Parthians; Matthew was allotted Ethiopia; and Bartholomew the part of India contiguous to that country.”⁠⁴⁴

Other ancient writers scatter him elsewhere. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia’s survey of the record concedes that “ancient writers are not as one as to the countries evangelized by Matthew” — almost all, it reports, mention an Ethiopia “to the south of the Caspian Sea (not Ethiopia in Africa),” while others name Persia, Parthia, Macedonia, and Syria.⁠⁴⁵ The Coptic-Arabic hagiographical tradition, for its part, has him evangelize and die in Parthia.⁠⁴⁶ Even the famous “Ethiopia” is slippery: the Greek apocryphal acts set Matthew’s mission in a city of man-eaters belonging to the fictional geography of the Andrew romances — a setting later readers located in the Pontus region, which is why older scholarship distinguishes a “Pontic Ethiopia” from the African one — while Rufinus’s Ethiopia is plainly the African kingdom of Aksum.⁠⁴⁷ The honest summary: the early Church remembered that Matthew left Judea to preach somewhere east or south, and no two branches of the tradition agreed where.

The legends: fire, sword, and the altar

Three incompatible deaths circulate in the apocryphal literature. The Greek Acts of Matthew — a late sequel to the Acts of Andrew, set in the man-eaters’ city of Myrna — has King Fulvanus nail Matthew to the ground and burn him; the fire turns to dew, then melts the king’s idols, and Matthew dies in peace after a final prayer, whereupon the king converts and takes the apostle’s name.⁠⁴⁸ The Coptic-Arabic martyrdom tradition has him beheaded by royal order in Parthia.⁠⁴⁹ And the Latin tradition — transmitted through the Pseudo-Abdias collection and made universal in the West by the Golden Legend — gives the story every medieval Christian knew: Matthew in Ethiopia, the king’s daughter Ephigenia consecrated as a virgin, the wicked successor King Hirtacus demanding her hand, and Matthew slain at the altar for defending her consecration. In Caxton’s English: “the king sent a tormentor which slew Matthew with a sword behind him, which was standing by the altar holding up his hands into heaven, and so was consecrate a martyr.”⁠⁵⁰

These are religious romances, not history, and the Church knows it. The reader should also be warned off a false friend: the medieval text called the “Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew” is an infancy gospel about Mary and the child Jesus, and has nothing to do with the apostle’s career or death.⁠⁵¹

What the Church actually claims

The current Roman Martyrology — revised in 2001 and 2004 precisely to prune unhistorical accretions — commemorates Matthew on September 21 as the tax collector called by Jesus who became apostle and evangelist. It says nothing about how or where he died. No martyrdom is asserted; no Ethiopia, no Parthia.⁠⁵² The liturgy nevertheless vests his feast in red, the color of the apostles and martyrs — the Church’s traditional veneration of him as martyr continuing in practice while her official historical claims have quietly narrowed to what the evidence supports.⁠⁵³ Readers of the posts on Evaristus and Hyginus have seen the same pattern in the popes series: the modern Church is more historically careful than her medieval legendary, and unembarrassed about the difference.

The Relics: Salerno

Whatever the truth about where Matthew died, the medieval West knew exactly where he ended up. In 954, relics venerated as Matthew’s were solemnly translated from Lucania in southern Italy to Salerno under the Lombard prince Gisulf I. The earlier itinerary the legend supplies — from Ethiopia to Lucania by way of shipwreck and rediscovery — is unverifiable tradition; the translation to Salerno itself is the documentable event.⁠⁵⁴

A century and a quarter later the relics received one of the great Romanesque settings in Italy. The Norman conqueror Robert Guiscard began the cathedral of Salerno around 1076–1080, with the archbishop Alfanus I; Pope Gregory VII consecrated it in 1084 — and then the story folds in on itself, because Gregory, driven from Rome in the investiture struggle, died in exile at Salerno on May 25, 1085, and was buried in the cathedral he had just consecrated. The reformer pope who humbled an emperor at Canossa lies a few steps from the tax collector’s crypt.⁠⁵⁵ Salerno keeps two Matthean feasts to this day — September 21 with the great patronal procession, and May 6, the memorial of the relics’ arrival — and the cathedral’s tradition of the “manna of Saint Matthew,” a liquid said to exude at the tomb, remains a local devotional claim the Church has never made the subject of any official pronouncement.⁠⁵⁶

Matthew in Catholic Worship and Devotion

September 21 and the Roman Canon

The Western Church has kept Matthew’s feast on September 21 since the early medieval martyrologies; the Byzantine East commemorates him on November 16 — the date the Greek apocryphal acts themselves assign to his death — and again with all the apostles on June 30.⁠⁵⁷ His name is fixed in the most solemn place the Roman liturgy affords: the Communicantes of the Roman Canon — the First Eucharistic Prayer’s daily roll call of the apostles, where his name follows Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, and Bartholomew, with Simon and Jude after him.⁠⁵⁸

The feast’s propers are a sustained meditation on the call. The Gospel is Matthew 9:9–13 itself; the first reading, Ephesians 4:1–7, 11–13, on the ascended Christ who gave the Church “apostles… evangelists” — Matthew was both; and the Communion Antiphon places Matthew 9:13 on the communicant’s lips: “I did not come to call the just, but sinners.”⁠⁵⁹ The collect addresses the God who chose a tax collector as an apostle “with untold mercy” — the Latin ineffabili misericordia — and asks that, sustained by Matthew’s example and intercession, we may hold firm in following him.⁠⁶⁰ Mercy is the feast’s single note, struck from every side.

The winged man

In Christian art Matthew is the winged man — often rendered as an angel — of the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4. The assignment is the oldest and most stable element of the whole tetramorph tradition: Irenaeus, the first Father to correlate the four creatures with the four evangelists, already gives Matthew the man, because his Gospel opens with a human genealogy — “Matthew, again, relates His generation as a man… This, then, is the Gospel of His humanity.”⁠⁶¹ The other three creatures shuffled among the evangelists for two centuries until Jerome fixed the now-familiar scheme — Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the ox, John the eagle — but Matthew’s man never moved.⁠⁶² It is a fitting emblem for the evangelist of the genealogy, of God-with-us, of the Word made kin: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham, begins with the human family tree, and the Church gave its author the human face.

That emblem produced the most familiar iconographic type of Matthew: the evangelist at his desk, the angel at his shoulder — Caravaggio’s Inspiration of Saint Matthew, Rembrandt’s Saint Matthew and the Angel, and the Guido Reni canvas in the Vatican Pinacoteca that heads this post, where the angel counts off points on its fingers as the old tax collector writes.⁠⁶³

Benedict XVI’s catechesis

When Benedict XVI reached Matthew in his Wednesday-audience cycle on the apostles, on August 30, 2006, he organized the entire catechesis around the scandal of the call. “Jesus welcomes into the group of his close friends a man who, according to the concepts in vogue in Israel at that time, was regarded as a public sinner,” the pope said; and from this “a first fact strikes one… Jesus does not exclude anyone from his friendship.” The pope pressed the point to its evangelical core: “The good news of the Gospel consists precisely in this: offering God’s grace to the sinner!” And he drew the figure of Matthew into a single sentence that could stand as this post’s thesis: “in the figure of Matthew, the Gospels present to us a true and proper paradox: those who seem to be the farthest from holiness can even become a model of the acceptance of God’s mercy and offer a glimpse of its marvellous effects in their own lives.”⁠⁶⁴

Benedict also paused over the instant obedience — “he rose and followed him” — reading in the rising a whole theology of conversion: “In this ‘he rose’, it is legitimate to read detachment from a sinful situation and at the same time, a conscious attachment to a new, upright life in communion with Jesus.”⁠⁶⁵ For Matthew, the pope noted, following meant “leaving everything, especially what guaranteed him a reliable source of income, even if it was often unfair and dishonourable.” The fishermen left nets they could return to. The tax collector burned a bridge.

Miserando atque eligendo: Bede, Caravaggio, and Pope Francis

Sometime around the year 700, the Venerable Bede preached a homily on Matthew’s call that contains the most consequential sentence ever written about this apostle. Commenting on “Jesus saw a man named Matthew,” Bede wrote: Vidit ergo Iesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi: Sequere me — “Jesus therefore saw the tax collector, and because he saw by having mercy and by choosing, he said to him: Follow me.”⁠⁶⁶ The Church reads that homily in the Office of Readings every September 21. Miserando atque eligendo — “by having mercy and by choosing” — became the episcopal motto of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and in 2013 it became the motto of Pope Francis.

The Vatican’s own explanation of the papal arms tells the story behind the choice: on the feast of Saint Matthew in 1953, the young Bergoglio — sixteen years old, not quite three months from his seventeenth birthday — went to confession at his parish church before a student celebration and experienced there, in his own later telling, an encounter with the mercy of God that he identified ever afterward as the moment of his call to religious life.⁠⁶⁷ A tax collector’s feast day, a confessional, a vocation: the pattern of Matthew 9:9 replaying itself in Buenos Aires.

And then there is the painting. Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew, painted for the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome at the very end of the sixteenth century, hangs with its two companion canvases — the Inspiration over the altar and the Martyrdom opposite — in what may be the most visited side chapel in Rome.⁠⁶⁸ Benedict XVI invoked it in his catechesis: “To imagine the scene described in Mt 9:9, it suffices to recall Caravaggio’s magnificent canvas, kept here in Rome at the Church of St Louis of the French.”⁠⁶⁹ As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio would visit the chapel when in Rome, staying nearby on the Via della Scrofa; and when, as pope, he was asked “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?”, he answered with the painting: “That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew.” And again: “this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.”⁠⁷⁰

No other apostle’s call scene has had this kind of afterlife in the Church’s living devotion. The Catechism, for its part, reads the meal at Matthew’s house as nothing less than a preview of the messianic banquet: Jesus’ table fellowship with tax collectors scandalized precisely because, by sharing their table, “he was admitting them to the messianic banquet” — identifying his own mercy toward sinners with God’s.⁠⁷¹

What Matthew Gives the Church

Strip away the contested biography and the incompatible legends, and what remains is not small. It is, arguably, the most complete single image of grace in the apostolic college.

The Church is apostolic, the Catechism teaches, because she is built on the foundation of the Twelve — chosen witnesses whose office in its untransmittable core was to have seen the risen Lord.⁠⁷² Every man in that foundation row was a particular man with a particular past, and the Church has always understood that the particulars preach. Peter’s foundation-stone is impulsive and three times faithless; Thomas’s is skeptical; Matthew’s is despised. The First Gospel’s list will not even let the title go unglossed: “Matthew the tax collector.” The Church’s foundation includes, by Jesus’ deliberate choice, a man whose trade his whole society regarded as legalized theft — and the Gospel tradition, far from burying the fact, carved it into the apostle’s permanent title.

That is why the figure of Matthew has always belonged especially to the unlikely: to the compromised, the collaborators, the men in dishonorable trades. His traditional patronage — accountants, bankers, bookkeepers, customs officers, tax collectors — is the Church’s gentle joke with a serious point: the professions of money, the ones medieval Christendom suspected and modern culture resents, get the apostle who proves none of it puts a man beyond the reach of “Follow me.”⁠⁷³

And his deepest gift is a single Greek participle’s worth of theology that took flesh at a tollbooth. Jesus, says Bede, saw Matthew miserando atque eligendo — through mercy, and through election. Not mercy after reform; mercy as the instrument of the call itself. The man got up from the customs post before he had repaid anyone, reformed anything, or proved anything. The proof came after — in the banquet he threw for other tax collectors, so that they could meet the one who had called him; in the Gospel tradition that bears his name and never stops talking about mercy; in the line of sinners from the second century to a Buenos Aires confessional in 1953 who have recognized themselves in him. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” Matthew is what that sentence looks like when it stands up and follows.

Further reading

• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017) — chapter 5 contains the onomastic argument about Matthew and Levi.
• Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1997) — the standard Catholic critical introduction; chapter 8 covers Matthew.
• R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007) — the major recent commentary most sympathetic to the traditional connection of the apostle to the Gospel.
• Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7, rev. ed., trans. James E. Crouch, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007) — the magisterial critical commentary.
• John R. Donahue, “Tax Collectors and Sinners: An Attempt at Identification,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 33 (1971): 39–61 — the standard study of what a Galilean tax collector was.
• Benedict XVI, General Audience of August 30, 2006 — the magisterial catechesis on Matthew, available at vatican.va.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Saint Matthew the Apostle?

Matthew was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus and is traditionally identified as the author of the First Gospel. The Gospels describe him as a tax collector at the customs post in Capernaum whom Jesus called with the words “Follow me” (Matthew 9:9). He appears in all four New Testament lists of the apostles — uniquely tagged “the tax collector” in Matthew 10:3 — and is last mentioned in the upper room in Acts 1:13.

Are Matthew and Levi the same person?

The Church has traditionally identified them as one man with two names, since Mark and Luke call the tax collector at the customs post “Levi” while the First Gospel calls him “Matthew.” The identification is ancient and defensible, but it is genuinely contested: both names are common Semitic personal names, and scholars such as Richard Bauckham have argued that a Palestinian Jew bearing two common Semitic names would be virtually unparalleled. Nothing doctrinal depends on the question.

Did Matthew write the Gospel of Matthew?

The unanimous early tradition — Papias, Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome — says the apostle Matthew wrote a Gospel “in the Hebrew language.” Most modern scholars, including most Catholic scholars, regard the canonical Greek Matthew as the work of a later Jewish-Christian author writing in the apostle’s tradition, because the Greek text does not read like a translation and depends on Mark. The early Church was nevertheless certain the First Gospel’s voice was, in some real sense, Matthew’s own.

How did Saint Matthew die? Was he a martyr?

The honest answer is that nobody knows. The earliest relevant witness — Heracleon, quoted by Clement of Alexandria in the second century — implies Matthew was not martyred, and the pseudo-Hippolytan list says he “fell asleep” (died peacefully) in Parthia. The familiar martyrdom story — slain at the altar in Ethiopia for defending the consecrated virgin Ephigenia — comes from late apocryphal romance via the Golden Legend. The current Roman Martyrology commemorates Matthew without asserting martyrdom at all, though his feast is still vested liturgically in red.

Where are Saint Matthew’s relics?

Relics venerated as Matthew’s were translated to Salerno in southern Italy in 954 and rest in the crypt of Salerno Cathedral, which Pope Gregory VII consecrated in 1084. Gregory himself died in exile at Salerno the next year and is buried in the same cathedral. Salerno celebrates Matthew on September 21 and commemorates the relics’ arrival on May 6.

When is the feast of Saint Matthew?

September 21 in the Roman calendar (a feast); November 16 in the Byzantine East. Matthew is also named daily in the Roman Canon, in the Communicantes list of the apostles. The feast’s Gospel is the call scene itself, Matthew 9:9–13, and its Communion Antiphon is Matthew 9:13: “I did not come to call the just, but sinners.”

What does “miserando atque eligendo” mean, and what does it have to do with Matthew?

It is a phrase from the Venerable Bede’s homily on Matthew’s call, read in the Office of Readings on his feast: Jesus saw the tax collector “by having mercy and by choosing” (miserando atque eligendo), and said “Follow me.” Jorge Mario Bergoglio took the phrase as his episcopal motto and kept it as Pope Francis, tracing his own vocation to a confession on the feast of Saint Matthew in 1953 and identifying himself with the called tax collector in Caravaggio’s painting: “That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew.”

Why is Matthew’s symbol a winged man?

Because his Gospel opens with the human genealogy of Jesus. Irenaeus, the first Father to match the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation to the evangelists, gave Matthew the figure of the man for that reason — and while the lion, ox, and eagle shuffled among the other evangelists for two centuries until Jerome fixed the standard scheme, Matthew’s man never moved. The winged man became the angel at the evangelist’s desk in Christian art.

---

Footnotes

1. 1. Matt 9:9 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE (New American Bible Revised Edition) is the canonical English Catholic translation of Scripture used in the United States.

2. 2. Pope Francis, interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J., August 2013, English text at vatican.va; published in English as "A Big Heart Open to God," America, September 19, 2013.

3. 3. Matt 9:9 (NABRE).

4. 4. Mark 2:13–14 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

5. 5. Luke 5:27–29 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org: "And leaving everything behind, he got up and followed him. Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house."

6. 6. Matt 9:10–13 (NABRE), quoting Hos 6:6; parallels at Mark 2:15–17 and Luke 5:29–32. Luke alone adds "to repentance" (Luke 5:32).

7. 7. The Roman Missal, 3rd typical ed. (2011), Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist (September 21), Communion Antiphon (Matt 9:13).

8. 8. John R. Donahue, "Tax Collectors and Sinners: An Attempt at Identification," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 33 (1971): 39–61; see also his article "Tax Collector," in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 6:337–38.

9. 9. See Craig S. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), on Matt 9:9, and R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), on the same verse. "Via Maris" as a name for the Damascus–coast road is a later label (from the Vulgate of Isa 9:1), which is why the text above says "later called."

10. 10. M. Ned. 3:4 (text at Sefaria); b. Sanh. 25b on the disqualification of tax collectors as witnesses. These rabbinic compilations post-date Jesus by a century or more and are cited here as witnesses to a persistent attitude, not as direct evidence for the 20s AD.

11. 11. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), ch. 6 ("The Sinners").

12. 12. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Hom. 30 (on Matt 9:9), trans. George Prevost, rev. M. B. Riddle, NPNF1 10 (1888), newadvent.org.

13. 13. For both the inference and the caution, see Michael J. Kok, "The Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew," Bible and Interpretation (March 2020), bibleinterp.arizona.edu, with the literature cited there.

14. 14. Matt 10:2–4; Mark 3:16–19; Luke 6:14–16; Acts 1:13 (all NABRE).

15. 15. Matt 10:3 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The epithet appears in none of the other three lists.

16. 16. Chrysostom, Hom. Matt. 30 (NPNF1 10, trans. Prevost, rev. Riddle).

17. 17. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), ch. 5 ("The Twelve"), quotation at p. 108 of the first edition (2006).

18. 18. Acts 1:13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

19. 19. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.5, quoting the Preaching of Peter (Kerygma Petri), trans. William Wilson, ANF 2 (1885), ccel.org. The explicit form of the tradition — that the Lord commanded the apostles not to leave Jerusalem for twelve years — is reported by Apollonius, quoted in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.18.14 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1).

20. 20. Jerome, De viris illustribus 3, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson, NPNF2 3 (1892), newadvent.org.

21. 21. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Matt 9:9–13 (Jerome), ed. John Henry Newman (Oxford: Parker, 1841), ccel.org. The authorities Thomas assembles on this pericope are Chrysostom, Jerome, the Gloss, Remigius, Augustine, Rabanus Maurus, and Hilary.

22. 22. Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, Word Biblical Commentary 33A (Dallas: Word, 1993), 238.

23. 23. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed., 108–9, drawing on Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part I: Palestine 330 BCE–200 CE (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002). Matthew is the ninth most popular male name in Ilan's data (62 occurrences), Levi the seventeenth (25 occurrences).

24. 24. Mark 3:16 (NABRE): "he appointed the Twelve: Simon, whom he named Peter." No comparable notice exists for Levi/Matthew in any source. On the absence of a renaming tradition see Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 238.

25. 25. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 1st ed. (2006), 108–12, esp. 111 on Matt 9:10's "in the house" (en tē oikia) against Mark 2:15.

26. 26. On the Mark 2:14 variant ("James the son of Alphaeus" in Codex Bezae and others) see Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), ad loc. Origen treats Matthew/Levi as a double name in the preface to his Commentary on Romans but states in Contra Celsum 1.62 that Levi was not among the Twelve; both passages are discussed in Kok, "Patristic Traditions."

27. 27. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 4.9, trans. Wilson, ANF 2, ccel.org; quoted in full in the martyrdom section below.

28. 28. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), September 21. The elogium describes Matthew as the publican "called Levi" whom Jesus called from the tax office, who became apostle and evangelist; an English rendering is available at gcatholic.org.

29. 29. Papias of Hierapolis, quoted in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.16, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, NPNF2 1 (1890), ccel.org.

30. 30. McGiffert's own note observes that both Papias fragments are "evidently torn out of their context" by Eusebius. For the "Hebrew style" reading of Hebraidi dialektō associated with Josef Kürzinger, and the state of the question generally, see the discussion and literature in Kok, "Patristic Traditions," and R. T. France, Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989), 64–66.

31. 31. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.1.1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF 1 (1885), newadvent.org. The passage is also preserved in Greek by Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.8.2.

32. 32. Origen, from the first book of his Commentary on Matthew, quoted in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.4 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1), newadvent.org.

33. 33. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.24.6 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1), newadvent.org. The preceding sentence (3.24.5) reports the tradition that "of all the disciples of the Lord, only Matthew and John have left us written memorials."

34. 34. Jerome, Vir. ill. 3 (trans. Richardson, NPNF2 3).

35. 35. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.10.3 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1), newadvent.org. Eusebius hedges twice ("is said," "It is reported"). On the Bartholomew side of this tradition see the Bartholomew post in this series.

36. 36. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1997), ch. 8; Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7, rev. ed., trans. James E. Crouch, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 59.

37. 37. W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, ICC, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 12; their catalogue of options on the Levi/Matthew change is at vol. 2 (1991), 98–99.

38. 38. France, The Gospel of Matthew (NICNT), on 9:9 (p. 352) and the introduction; see also his Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher, 67–70.

39. 39. Benedict XVI, General Audience, August 30, 2006, vatican.va.

40. 40. The text Jerome knew from the Nazarenes is generally identified by modern scholarship with the Gospel of the Nazarenes (or the Gospel of the Hebrews), a later Jewish-Christian gospel; see the discussion in Kok, "Patristic Traditions."

41. 41. Heracleon, quoted in Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 4.9 (trans. Wilson, ANF 2), ccel.org. The transmitted text is awkward — read literally it says "all the saved" made the voice-confession — but Heracleon's argument requires, and scholars generally read, the named apostles as examples of those who confessed by life and voice rather than before the authorities.

42. 42. Pseudo-Hippolytus, On the Twelve Apostles 7, trans. J. H. MacMahon, ANF 5 appendix (1886), newadvent.org. The list is a Byzantine-era compilation wrongly attributed to the third-century Hippolytus.

43. 43. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.1.1–3 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1), quoting Origen's Commentary on Genesis, bk. 3.

44. 44. Socrates Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 1.19, trans. A. C. Zenos, NPNF2 2 (1890), ccel.org. The NPNF editors note that Socrates here translates Rufinus "almost word for word"; Rufinus's original is at Hist. eccl. 10.9 (formerly cited as 1.9), trans. Philip R. Amidon, The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia, Books 10 and 11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

45. 45. Eugène Jacquier, "St. Matthew," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1911), newadvent.org.

46. 46. The Coptic-Arabic-Ethiopic Martyrdom of Matthew (CANT 269); see the summary at NASSCAL e-Clavis.

47. 47. On the geography of the Greek acts and the Andrew-cycle setting, see the NASSCAL e-Clavis entry on the Acts of Matthew (CANT 267); on Rufinus's Ethiopia as Aksum, see Amidon, Church History of Rufinus, on 10.9–10.

48. 48. Acts of Matthew (CANT 267; BHG 1224–1225), Greek text in Lipsius–Bonnet, Acta apostolorum apocrypha 2.1 (Leipzig, 1898), 217–62; English translation ("Acts and Martyrdom of St. Matthew") in ANF 8, newadvent.org. The work is generally dated between the fourth and sixth centuries.

49. 49. Martyrdom of Matthew (CANT 269; BHO 723), per the NASSCAL e-Clavis summary cited above, n. 46.

50. 50. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, "The Life of St. Matthew," in William Caxton's 1483 English version, Fordham Medieval Sourcebook. The ultimate source of the Hirtacus story is the Latin apocryphal passio transmitted in the Pseudo-Abdias collection (compiled in the late sixth or seventh century).

51. 51. Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (CANT 51), a Latin infancy gospel of the seventh or eighth century reworking the Protevangelium of James; see NASSCAL e-Clavis.

52. 52. Martyrologium Romanum (2004), September 21; above, n. 28.

53. 53. The Roman Missal, 3rd typical ed. (2011), Feast of Saint Matthew (September 21): the feast takes red vestments, per the Missal's rubrics for feasts of apostles and evangelists.

54. 54. The translation of 954 under Gisulf I is the consistent datum of the south-Italian sources and the cathedral's own tradition; see the survey at Salerno Cathedral (Wikipedia) with the literature cited there.

55. 55. Construction from c. 1076–1080 under Robert Guiscard and Archbishop Alfanus I; consecration by Gregory VII in 1084 (the sources do not agree on the day); Gregory's death at Salerno May 25, 1085, and burial in the cathedral. See the survey and literature at the Wikipedia article cited above, n. 54.

56. 56. The September 21 and May 6 observances and the "manna" tradition are documented in Salerno's diocesan and civic materials; see, e.g., the accounts of the feast at local Salerno tourism and parish sources. The manna is a devotional claim, not an object of any magisterial pronouncement.

57. 57. September 21 is attested in the early-medieval Western martyrological tradition (the Hieronymian Martyrology) and has been universal in the Roman calendar since; the Byzantine feast is November 16, the date the Greek Acts of Matthew itself assigns to the apostle's death, with the Synaxis of the Holy Apostles on June 30.

58. 58. The Roman Missal, 3rd typical ed. (2011), Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon), Communicantes.

59. 59. Lectionary for Mass, no. 643 (Feast of Saint Matthew): Eph 4:1–7, 11–13; Matt 9:9–13. Readings at bible.usccb.org.

60. 60. The Roman Missal, 3rd typical ed. (2011), Collect for September 21.

61. 61. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.11.8 (trans. Roberts and Rambaut, ANF 1), newadvent.org. Irenaeus's full scheme differs from the later standard — he gives John the lion and Mark the eagle — but Matthew's man is already in place.

62. 62. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, preface (Plures fuisse, 398; CCSL 77), whose scheme — man, lion, ox, eagle — was adopted by Gregory the Great and became universal in Western art.

63. 63. Caravaggio, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602), San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome; Rembrandt, Saint Matthew and the Angel (1661), Musée du Louvre, Paris; Guido Reni, Saint Matthew and the Angel (c. 1635–1640), Pinacoteca Vaticana.

64. 64. Benedict XVI, General Audience, August 30, 2006 (above, n. 39).

65. 65. Benedict XVI, General Audience, August 30, 2006 (above, n. 39).

66. 66. Bede, Homiliae evangelii 1.21, on the feast of Saint Matthew (CCSL 122:149–151). The Latin and the citation are given in the Holy See's official explanation of the papal coat of arms, vatican.va. The homily is read in the Office of Readings on September 21.

67. 67. "The Coat of Arms of Pope Francis," vatican.va. Bergoglio was born December 17, 1936, and so was sixteen on September 21, 1953; the Vatican heraldry page rounds his age to seventeen.

68. 68. The Contarelli Chapel contract dates from July 1599; the Calling and Martyrdom were installed by 1600 and the present Inspiration by 1602. Caravaggio's first version of the altarpiece, Saint Matthew and the Angel, was rejected — early biographers say as indecorous, a judgment modern scholarship debates — and was destroyed in Berlin in 1945.

69. 69. Benedict XVI, General Audience, August 30, 2006 (above, n. 39).

70. 70. Pope Francis, interview with Antonio Spadaro (above, n. 2); on the Via della Scrofa visits, the same interview.

71. 71. Catechism of the Catholic Church 588–589, vatican.va; see also CCC 545 on the call of sinners, vatican.va.

72. 72. CCC 857–860, vatican.va, esp. 860: "In the office of the apostles there is one aspect that cannot be transmitted: to be the chosen witnesses of the Lord's Resurrection and so the foundation stones of the Church."

73. 73. The traditional patronage list — accountants, bankers, bookkeepers, customs officers, security guards, stockbrokers, tax collectors, and the city of Salerno — rests on long custom rather than any formal decree; see, e.g., the liturgical-year entry at Catholic Culture.