Saint Matthias: The Apostle Who Replaced Judas

The coda to a series on the Twelve Apostles: the apostle who replaced the traitor and made the Twelve whole again.

Every other member of the Twelve was chosen by Jesus. Matthias was chosen by the Church. He is the one apostle added to the college after the Resurrection and after the Ascension, in the ten days of waiting before Pentecost, by a gathering of about a hundred and twenty disciples who prayed, cast lots, and watched the lot fall on him. He is named in exactly one passage of the New Testament — the last twelve verses of the first chapter of Acts — and after that passage he vanishes. He speaks no recorded word. He performs no recorded deed. He is never mentioned again in any book of the Bible.

And yet those twelve verses are among the most theologically loaded in the New Testament, because the election of Matthias is the moment at which the Church first does something the apostles would do again and again for two thousand years: it fills a vacant apostolic office. The scene is the first act of apostolic succession. It is also the last casting of lots in the Bible — the final time the people of God reach for the old method of discerning the divine will before the Spirit arrives at Pentecost to discern it from within. And it is the restoration of a broken number, the repair of the twelve-stone foundation that Judas had cracked.

This series has spent twelve installments on the men Jesus called by name, and it closed, as the Gospels close their lists, with Judas Iscariot, the apostle who became a synonym for betrayal. This post is the coda the Gospels themselves supply. Before the Spirit could come and the Church could be born, the Twelve had to be twelve again. Matthias is how.

We will take him with the same rules the rest of this series has used: the New Testament evidence first, read closely; then the theology the scene actually carries — the lot, the qualification, the office; then the hardest question the passage raises, whether the apostles chose the wrong man; and last, the tangle of legend and relic and feast that grew up around a saint about whom, in strict history, almost nothing is known.

Matthias in the New Testament

The only apostle chosen after the Ascension

The scene is set with unusual care. Luke has just narrated the Ascension; the eleven surviving apostles have come down from the Mount of Olives and returned to the upper room in Jerusalem, where Luke names them one by one — “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.”⁠¹ The list is the same as the Gospel rosters, minus one. The twelfth name, the traitor’s, is simply gone. The college that Jesus had built to the number twelve now numbers eleven, and the gap is conspicuous precisely because Luke has just read the roll.

Into that gap Peter steps. “During those days,” Luke writes, “Peter stood up in the midst of the brothers (there was a group of about one hundred and twenty persons in the one place).”⁠² The setting is the interval between two events on which the whole of Acts turns — after the Lord has been taken up, before the Spirit has come down. The Church exists, but it is not yet the Church of Pentecost. It is a community waiting in an upper room, and its first corporate act, before the fire falls, is to make itself whole.

Peter’s two Psalms and the vacant office

Peter’s speech is short and almost entirely scriptural. He begins with the necessity of what has happened: “the scripture had to be fulfilled which the holy Spirit spoke beforehand through the mouth of David, concerning Judas, who was the guide for those who arrested Jesus.”⁠³ Then comes the grim parenthesis on the traitor’s end — the field bought with the wages of iniquity, the fall, the bursting open, the Akeldama or “Field of Blood” — a notice that famously does not match the hanging reported in Matthew, and which the Catholic tradition has never pretended to harmonize neatly.⁠⁴ The point, for Peter, is not the mechanism of the death but the vacancy it creates.

To name that vacancy, Peter reaches for two psalms. “For it is written in the Book of Psalms,” he says: “‘Let his encampment become desolate, and may no one dwell in it.’ And: ‘May another take his office.’”⁠⁵ The first line is from Psalm 69, the second from Psalm 109. It is the second that does the work. The Greek word Luke uses for “office” is episkopē (ἐπισκοπή) — oversight, the charge of an overseer — and it is the same root that gives the New Testament its word for a bishop, episkopos.⁠⁶ Peter does not treat the apostolate as a personal endowment that died with the man. He treats it as an office, a standing position in a standing body, which can be vacated and which must therefore be filled. That single grammatical decision — to call the place an office rather than a gift — is the seed of everything the Church would later say about succession.

The qualification, and the two candidates

Having established that the office must be filled, Peter states the qualification, and it is exacting. “Therefore, it is necessary that one of the men who accompanied us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day on which he was taken up from us, become with us a witness to his resurrection.”⁠⁷ The candidate must satisfy two conditions at once. He must have been present for the entire public ministry, from the Jordan to the Ascension; and he must be able to serve as a witness to the Resurrection. The apostolate, on Peter’s own definition, is first of all an office of testimony, and testimony requires having been there.

Two men met the standard. “So they proposed two,” Luke writes, “Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias.”⁠⁸ Of Joseph we know three names and nothing else; of Matthias we know one name and very little more. The name itself is a clue to his world and no more than that: “Matthias” is a Greek shortening of Mattathias, the Hebrew Mattithiah, meaning “gift of Yahweh” — a good Maccabean name for a Galilean Jew of the first century.⁠⁹ An early tradition, preserved by Eusebius on the authority of Clement of Alexandria, holds that both candidates had themselves been among the seventy disciples whom Jesus sent out two by two — that the choice, in other words, was not between an apostle and a stranger but between two seasoned members of the wider circle.⁠¹⁰ The tradition is early and plausible; it is not, however, in the text, which tells us only that two qualified men stood before the assembly and that one of them was named Matthias.

Chosen by Lot

The prayer and the lot

What happens next is the strangest feature of the whole episode, and the one most easily passed over. The assembly does not vote. It does not defer to Peter. It prays, and then it gambles. “Then they prayed,” Luke writes, “‘You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this apostolic ministry from which Judas turned away to go to his own place.’ Then they gave lots to them, and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was counted with the eleven apostles.”⁠¹¹

The prayer and the lot belong together, and the prayer interprets the lot. The community does not regard the drawing of lots as a surrender to chance; it regards it as a question put to God, who alone “know[s] the hearts of all” and who alone can therefore see which of two equally qualified men he has already chosen. The lot is not a coin toss. It is a request for a verdict, and the verdict is read off the outcome. This is exactly the theology of the casting of lots that the Old Testament had taught for a thousand years, and which the Book of Proverbs states in a single line that hangs over the entire scene: “Into the bag the lot is cast, but from the LORD comes every decision.”⁠¹² The dice are human; the answer is divine.

Chrysostom and the deference of Peter

The Fathers noticed the restraint of Peter in this scene, and made much of it. John Chrysostom, preaching through Acts at Antioch near the end of the fourth century, was struck that the chief of the apostles arrogated nothing to himself. “Observe how Peter does everything with the common consent,” he says; “nothing imperiously.”⁠¹³ Peter proposes; the assembly disposes; God decides. Chrysostom presses the question that the modern reader also feels — why did Peter not simply appoint a man on his own authority? — and gives two answers. The first is humility: Peter would not “seem to bestow it of favor.” The second is chronological, and it is the theological key to the whole passage. Peter could not yet act with the authority he would later have, Chrysostom says, because “he was not yet endowed with the spirit.”⁠¹⁴

That observation unlocks the lot. When Chrysostom reaches the drawing itself, he adds the decisive parenthesis: “And they gave forth their lots (for the spirit was not yet sent), and the lot fell upon Matthias.”⁠¹⁵ The community casts lots not because casting lots is the permanent method of the Church but because the permanent method has not yet arrived. They are between dispensations. The old way of reading God’s will — Urim and Thummim, the sacred lot, the question put to heaven and answered by an outcome — is still in force for ten more days. After Pentecost it will be obsolete.

The last casting of lots

This is the quiet hinge of Acts 1, and it is worth stating plainly: the election of Matthias is the last time anyone in the Bible casts lots to discern the will of God. Search the rest of Acts and the Epistles and the method never recurs. When the Jerusalem church must choose seven men to serve tables, the apostles do not draw lots; they ask the community to “select from among you seven reputable men,” and then lay hands on them.⁠¹⁶ When the church at Antioch must send out missionaries, the choice does not fall to a lottery; “the holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul.’”⁠¹⁷ Between Acts 1 and Acts 13 something has changed, and the change has a name and a date. The Spirit has come, and the Spirit speaks. The lot is laid down because it is no longer needed.

There is a tidy theological symmetry in this that the Church has always loved. Matthias stands on the seam between the old covenant and the new — chosen by the last lot, just before the first Pentecost, the final beneficiary of a method as old as Aaron and the final figure of an age about to close. He is, in a precise sense, the last apostle of the old way and a charter member of the new.

Why Matthias and Not Paul?

A question presses itself on any reader who knows how the rest of the New Testament goes. Within a few chapters Luke will introduce a man of incomparably greater consequence than Matthias — a persecutor knocked to the ground on the Damascus road, who will plant churches across the empire and write a third of the New Testament and call himself, without blushing, an apostle. Why did the Eleven not wait for Paul? Why fill the seat at all, when the most important apostle of the apostolic age had not yet been called?

The text answers the question before it is asked. The qualification Peter laid down — accompaniment “from the baptism of John until the day on which he was taken up” — is one that Paul, by definition, could never meet. Paul had not followed Jesus through Galilee. He had not stood at the Jordan or the empty tomb or the Mount of Olives. His encounter with the risen Christ came later, by a different road, and was of a different kind. Paul knew this perfectly well, and said so: he was an apostle “as to one born abnormally,” the last and the least, “not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”⁠¹⁸ His apostleship was real, but it was extraordinary — added to the Twelve, not numbered among them. Matthias filled the office of the Twelve precisely because he could meet the one condition Paul could not: he had been there from the beginning, an eyewitness of the whole.

So the Twelve and Paul are not rivals for a single chair. They are two distinct things. The Twelve are the foundation, the eyewitness college of the earthly ministry, sealed at the number of the tribes of Israel; Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles, called out of due time for a mission the Twelve could not have foreseen. To put Paul in Judas’s seat would have been to misunderstand both offices. Matthias belongs there because Matthias was a witness, and witness is the whole job.

Was the Election a Mistake?

Not everyone has been satisfied with that answer, and it would be unfair to the question to pretend the satisfaction is universal. A strand of Protestant interpretation, mostly in the dispensationalist and Plymouth Brethren tradition, has held that the Eleven jumped the gun — that they acted on their own initiative in the nervous interval before Pentecost, used a method the Spirit was about to retire, and chose the wrong man, and that God’s true replacement for Judas was Paul, the genuine twelfth apostle, whom the impatient Eleven preempted.

The most distinguished voice for this reading is the English expositor G. Campbell Morgan, whose commentary on Acts states the case with unusual bluntness. The episode, Morgan writes, reveals the apostles’ “inefficiency for organization; that the election of Matthias was wrong. Their idea of what was necessary as a witness to the resurrection was wrong.… The method of casting lots was no longer necessary. Thus we have the wrong appointment of Matthias. He was a good man, but the wrong man for this position, and he passed out of sight; and when presently we come to the final glory of the city of God, we see twelve foundation stones, and twelve apostles’ names, and I am not prepared to omit Paul from the twelve.”⁠¹⁹ The argument has a real force, and it rests on three observations that are each, in isolation, true: the choice was made before Pentecost; Matthias is never heard from again; and Paul is unquestionably the greater apostle.

The argument is nonetheless wrong, and the reasons it is wrong are worth setting out, because they are the reasons the Catholic tradition — and most of the Protestant tradition with it — reads the scene as a success rather than a blunder.

Consider first the silence. The claim that Matthias “passed out of sight” proves the election faulty assumes that an apostle who leaves no further trace in Scripture has failed. But by that standard almost the entire college failed. After Acts 1, the New Testament tells us essentially nothing about the later careers of Andrew, Bartholomew, Thomas, Philip, James son of Alphaeus, Simon, or Jude. The modern Reformed commentator David Guzik makes the point cleanly: “Even though we read nothing more of Matthias, we should not assume he was a failure as an apostle.… Matthias was no more of a failure than Matthew or Andrew or Thomas or any of the others.”⁠²⁰ Silence in Acts is the rule for the Twelve, not a mark of disqualification. To make it one for Matthias alone is special pleading.

Consider next the prayer. The whole force of the “they acted in the flesh” reading is that the Eleven proceeded by their own initiative rather than God’s. But the text says the opposite. The assembly does not choose Matthias; it asks God to choose, and reads his choice from the lot: “You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen.”⁠²¹ If the casting of lots genuinely yields, as Proverbs insists, a decision that “comes from the LORD,” then the man on whom the lot fell was the man God selected. To call the result a human error is to deny the premise the passage states in its own prayer.

John Calvin, who can hardly be accused of softness toward Rome, saw all of this and defended the election without hesitation. “It was meet that Matthias should be chosen into the place of Judas,” he wrote, “lest, through the treachery of one man, all that might seem to have been made of none effect which Christ had once appointed.” The number of the apostles was, for Calvin, “as it were, a holy number,” and its restoration was a matter of the gospel’s own credibility. “Although, therefore, Judas would (as much as in him lay) have disappointed the purpose of Christ, yet nevertheless it stood firm and stable. He perished as he was worthy, yet did the order of the apostles remain whole and sound.”⁠²² When Calvin and the Catechism agree against G. Campbell Morgan, the reader is entitled to conclude that the burden of proof lies heavily on the man who calls the first corporate act of the apostolic Church a mistake.

The Catholic reading needs no special machinery. The election was legitimate, providentially ordered, and exactly what Peter said it was: the filling of a vacated office by a qualified witness, ratified by a God who knows hearts. Paul, when his hour came, would be an apostle of a wholly different order, and the Church would have ample room for him. Matthias did not take Paul’s place. He took Judas’s.

The First Apostolic Succession

Step back from the particulars and the larger significance of the scene comes into view. In the upper room, before Pentecost, before a single bishop had been ordained, the apostolic Church does something that defines it ever after: it treats the apostolate as an office that survives the death or defection of the man who held it, and it fills the vacancy. The technical Catholic term for this is apostolic succession, and Acts 1 is its first instance and its scriptural charter.⁠²³

The Catechism draws the distinction the scene requires. The apostolic office, it teaches, has two aspects, one of which can be handed on and one of which cannot. “In the office of the apostles,” the Catechism says, “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. But their office also has a permanent aspect.… the apostles took care to appoint successors.”⁠²⁴ Read against Acts 1, the distinction is illuminating. The reason Matthias had to be an eyewitness “from the baptism of John” is that he was filling the non-transmissible aspect of the office — he had to be a foundation stone, and foundation stones must have seen the risen Lord. He is the last man who could ever qualify on those terms, and that is the point: the eyewitness college had to be sealed before the witnesses began to die. The transmissible aspect — the pastoral charge to teach and govern the Church — would later pass to bishops who had never seen Christ in the flesh, and they would receive it not by lot but by the laying on of hands.⁠²⁵

Acts 1, in other words, is where the Church learns that the apostolate is a structure and not merely a generation. The Second Vatican Council put the principle in its most quoted form: the apostles, “in order that the mission assigned to them might continue after their death, … passed on to their immediate cooperators, as it were, in the form of a testament, the duty of confirming and finishing the work begun by themselves.”⁠²⁶ The first link in that chain is forged not by Peter ordaining a successor but by the whole Church, in prayer, filling the seat of a man who had fallen away. Before the Church can hand on the office, it must show that the office can be handed on. The election of Matthias is the proof of concept.

It is worth being candid about the limits of the argument, because honest readers will press them. The word episkopē in Acts 1:20 means “office” or “oversight” in a general sense; it does not, by itself, prove the existence of the later monarchical episcopate, and a careful Catholic will not pretend that one Greek noun settles the question of church order. The case for apostolic succession is cumulative — it rests on the pattern of the apostles appointing successors, on the testimony of the second-century Fathers, and on the unbroken practice of the Church, not on a single proof-text. What Acts 1 supplies is the foundation: the demonstrated principle that an apostolic place is an office, that an office can be vacated, and that the Church has the authority to fill it. The rest of the doctrine is the working-out of that principle across twenty centuries.⁠²⁷

The Number Twelve

Why twelve? The whole episode presupposes that the number matters — that an eleven-man college is not merely smaller than a twelve-man college but defective, a thing requiring repair. The urgency Peter feels, the haste to fill the seat before Pentecost, makes sense only if the number twelve is itself a theological quantity, and it is.

Jesus had chosen twelve, and not eleven or thirteen, because twelve was the number of the tribes of Israel, and the Twelve were to be the nucleus of a restored Israel — the patriarchs of a new people of God. Jesus had said as much, promising the Twelve that, “when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of glory,” those who had followed him would “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”⁠²⁸ The number is not decorative. It is a claim — that this band of Galileans is the seed of the eschatological Israel, the twelve-tribe people remade around the Messiah. The official Catholic annotation on Acts puts the matter exactly: “The need to replace Judas was probably dictated by the symbolism of the number twelve, recalling the twelve tribes of Israel. This symbolism also indicates that … the Christian church is a reconstituted Israel.”⁠²⁹

This is why the seat could not be left empty, and why it had to be filled before the Spirit came. The Church that would be born at Pentecost had to be the whole Israel of God, the complete twelve-tribe foundation, or it would be born maimed. Chrysostom felt the force of this and gave it a memorable phrase: the replacement was sought, he says, so “that their college might not be left mutilated.”⁠³⁰ A mutilated foundation cannot bear a building. The Twelve had to be twelve.

And here the coda meets its theme. The Book of Revelation, looking to the end of all things, sees the city of God descending from heaven, and reports a single architectural detail: “the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.”⁠³¹ Twelve names — not eleven, and not eleven with an asterisk where the traitor used to be. One of those twelve names, carved into the foundation of the New Jerusalem, is Matthias’s. Judas broke the number; Matthias restored it; and the heavenly city is built on the restored twelve. The man chosen by the last lot, in the ten days of waiting, turns out to be a stone in the wall of heaven.

The Traditions of Matthias

Once Acts falls silent — which is to say, immediately — Matthias passes into a thicket of apocrypha and legend, and the first thing to be said about that material is that it is unreliable, and the second is that it is fascinating, and the third is that it cannot, half the time, decide whether it is talking about Matthias or about Matthew.

There existed in the second century a lost work, or possibly two related lost works, that went under his name: the Traditions of Matthias (the Greek Paradoseis), and a Gospel of Matthias. Whether these were a single text or two is a question that the surviving evidence cannot settle; Theodor Zahn argued they were identical, Adolf von Harnack that they were distinct, and the most honest modern verdict is that there is too little to decide.⁠³² What survives is a handful of sayings quoted by Clement of Alexandria, who treats them as genuine spiritual counsel even as he notes that the Gnostics had laid hold of them. One fragment, on the discipline of the body, Clement reports thus: Matthias “taught that we ought to fight against and abuse the flesh, and not give way to it for the sake of pleasure, but strengthen the soul by faith and knowledge” — sound asceticism, which the libertine Nicolaitans cited, perversely, in defense of indulgence.⁠³³ Another fragment makes wonder the beginning of wisdom: “the beginning of knowledge is wondering at objects,” Clement writes, and the Traditions exhort, “Wonder at what is before you.”⁠³⁴

The heretics found the name useful. Hippolytus reports that the Gnostic teacher Basilides claimed to possess secret discourses that Matthias had received privately from the Savior — an appeal to apostolic authority for doctrines the Church did not teach, of exactly the kind that a dozen apocryphal “gospels” were built to license.⁠³⁵ The Church was not fooled. Eusebius, surveying the books that circulated under apostolic names, files the Gospel of Matthias firmly among the forgeries: it belongs, he writes, with “the Gospels of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias,” works “cited by the heretics under the name of the apostles,” which “no one belonging to the succession of ecclesiastical writers has deemed worthy of mention.”⁠³⁶

And here we meet the confusion that shadows Matthias through the whole tradition, because it reaches even into the way these fragments are printed in English. The standard Victorian translation of Clement, the one most readers will find online, renders the apostle’s name in three of its four occurrences not as “Matthias” but as “Matthew” — so that the saying about Zacchaeus the tax collector, for instance, is attributed in English to “Matthew, the chief of the publicans,” where the Greek and the modern critical editions read “Matthias.”⁠³⁷ The slip is not the translator’s carelessness alone; it reflects a confusion as old as the manuscripts. The two names are near-twins — both begin with the gift-of-God element, both belong to obscure members of the Twelve — and the scribes and storytellers swapped them constantly. The Catholic Encyclopedia concedes the problem in so many words: “in the apocryphal writings, Matthew and Matthias have sometimes been confounded.”⁠³⁸ Keep the confusion in mind. It is about to govern the legends of his death.

Missions and Martyrdom: A Tangle of Legends

Where did Matthias go, and how did he die? The traditions answer confidently and incompatibly, and the most useful thing a reader can do is to hold them side by side and watch them contradict one another.

The Greek tradition sends him north and east, to the wild coast of the Black Sea. The historian Nicephorus Callistus reports that Matthias “first preached the Gospel in Judea, then in Ethiopia … and was crucified.”⁠³⁹ The “Ethiopia” here is not the African kingdom but the old classical name for Colchis, the land at the eastern end of the Black Sea, in what is now Georgia — a confusion of geography to match the confusion of names. An ancient apostolic itinerary, the Synopsis ascribed to Dorotheus, fixes the location with surprising specificity: Matthias “preached the Gospel to barbarians and cannibals in the interior of Ethiopia, at the harbour of the sea of Hyssus, at the mouth of the river Phasis,” and “died at Sebastopolis, and was buried there, near the Temple of the Sun.”⁠⁴⁰ Hyssus and the Phasis are real places on the Colchian coast; the Temple of the Sun and the cannibals are the furniture of legend.

The cannibals, in fact, have a literature of their own — and it is the clearest case of the Matthias-Matthew confusion at work. There survives a Greek romance, the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, in which the apostle assigned to a city of man-eaters called Mermedonia is captured, blinded, drugged, and held for slaughter, until Christ — piloting a ship in disguise — sends Andrew to rescue him. The tale is a fourth- or fifth-century invention, with no historical value whatever; but it was wildly popular, and it traveled far, becoming the direct source of the Old English poem Andreas, preserved in the tenth-century Vercelli Book.⁠⁴¹ And in the manuscripts of this very text the hero’s name slides back and forth between Matthias and Matthew, so that scholars still debate which apostle the story originally meant. The confusion is not a footnote to the legend; it is woven into its fabric.

When it comes to the death, the traditions splinter completely. The Western, Latin tradition has Matthias martyred at Jerusalem — stoned by the Jews and then, when the stoning failed to kill him, beheaded with an axe; and it is from this version that he takes the axe he carries in Western art.⁠⁴² The Eastern tradition, following Nicephorus, has him crucified in Colchis. A third strand, attributed to Hippolytus, has him not martyred at all, but dying of old age in Jerusalem. The accounts cannot be reconciled — a man cannot be beheaded in Judea and crucified in Georgia and die peacefully in his bed — and there is no historical instrument by which to choose among them. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, surveying the wreckage, says only that “all further information concerning the life and death of Matthias is vague and contradictory,” and that verdict has not improved with age.⁠⁴³ Beyond Acts 1, we do not know where Matthias went or how he died. We know only that the axe in the paintings comes from one legend among several, and that the legend cannot be verified.

Relics, Feast, and the Tomb at Trier

If the death is unknown, the relics are nonetheless venerated, and in a place that no reader would guess. The principal shrine of Saint Matthias is not in Jerusalem or Rome or Colchis but in the Rhineland, at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Matthias in Trier — which claims to hold his body, and which is, by its own description and the general report of the guidebooks, the only tomb of an apostle in Germany and indeed north of the Alps.⁠⁴⁴ The tradition holds that the relics were brought from the Holy Land to Trier on the authority of the Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine and the great fourth-century collector of relics. That provenance should be received with the caution it invites: the relics were “discovered” at Trier only in 1127, during building work on the abbey church, some eight centuries after Helena is supposed to have deposited them, and the gap is not nothing.⁠⁴⁵ What is certain is that from the twelfth century the abbey became a major pilgrimage center, and remains one, the apostle’s bones resting in the crypt of a Romanesque basilica that was dedicated in 1148.

The relics are not undisputed, and the dispute is itself a final instance of the confusions that dog this apostle. A portion of relics venerated as Matthias’s has long been claimed by the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, also on the authority of Helena; the Bollandists, the great Jesuit scholars of the saints, raised the awkward possibility that the Roman relics belong not to the apostle at all but to a different Matthias entirely — a second-century bishop of Jerusalem of the same name, whose history “would seem to have been confounded with that of the Apostle.”⁠⁴⁶ Further claims have attached to Padua and to the Roman fortress of Gonio in Georgia, where a marker identifies a grave inside the ruins as the apostle’s — though excavation has never confirmed it, and the local signage cannot consistently decide whether the apostle buried there is Matthias or Matthew.⁠⁴⁷ Even in the ground, Matthias cannot quite be told apart from his namesake.

The feast has wandered almost as much as the relics. In the traditional Roman calendar, the one in force before the reforms of the 1960s and still kept in the Extraordinary Form, the feast of Saint Matthias falls on February 24 — and in leap years it moves to February 25, by an old and pleasing quirk. February 24 was reckoned in the Roman calendar as “the sixth day before the Kalends of March,” and a leap year was a year in which that sixth day was doubled — the very meaning of the Latin bissextilis, “twice-sixth” — so that in leap years Matthias’s vigil keeps the first sixth day and his feast keeps the second.⁠⁴⁸ In the reform of the calendar that followed the Second Vatican Council, the feast was moved out of Lent altogether, to May 14, so that it would fall in the joy of Eastertide and near the Ascension — fitting placement, since the election it commemorates happened after the Ascension and before Pentecost.⁠⁴⁹ The Christian East, keeping its own reckoning, commemorates the apostle on August 9.⁠⁵⁰ By the logic of the axe that killed him in the Western legend, Matthias became the patron of carpenters and tailors and of those who work with edged tools, and he is invoked, by a gentler association, against the affliction of alcoholism.⁠⁵¹

What Matthias Gives the Church

Every apostle in this series leaves the Church a gift, and the gifts of the obscure apostles have been the strangest — Simon’s gift of pure inclusion, Jude’s of the lost cause, Bartholomew’s of a silence broken only by legend. Matthias, the most obscure of all, leaves a gift more structural than any of theirs, and it is this: he is the proof that the office outlives the man.

Look again at what the Church did in that upper room. One of the Twelve had betrayed his Lord and gone “to his own place,” and the foundation Jesus laid was, to all appearances, broken. The Church did not conclude that the breach was permanent. It did not decide that a college founded by Christ must dwindle as its members fell away, eleven and then ten and then none. It prayed, and it filled the seat, and in doing so it discovered something about itself that it has never since forgotten: that the apostolic office is larger than any apostle, that it can survive even treachery, and that the Church has the authority and the duty to keep it whole. The first vacancy in the history of the Church was filled before the first Pentecost — and the Church has been filling vacancies, in unbroken succession, ever since.

That is why the silence of Matthias does not trouble the tradition the way it troubles his critics. He was not called to be heard from. He was called to be a witness and a foundation stone, to stand in the gap and make the number whole, to be the twelfth name on the wall when the city came down from heaven. He did that, and then he disappeared into the work, which is what most of the Twelve did, and what most of the Church has done since. The series began with Peter the rock and ended, as the Gospels end, with Judas the traitor. It has a coda because the Gospel has a coda: the place of the traitor did not stay empty. Betrayal did not get the last word, or even the last seat. The last word was a lot cast in prayer, and the last seat went to a faithful man whose only recorded act was to be found worthy of it — Matthias, the gift of God, the apostle who made the Twelve whole again.

Further reading

• C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 1: Acts 1–14 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994).
• F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988).
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles, Sacra Pagina 5 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992).
• Dennis R. MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1990).
• Richard I. Pervo, Acts: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009).

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Saint Matthias?

Matthias was the disciple chosen to replace Judas Iscariot among the Twelve Apostles, as recounted in Acts 1:15–26. He was one of the wider circle who had followed Jesus from the baptism of John to the Ascension, and an early tradition counts him among the seventy disciples. After the Ascension, the gathered Church proposed two qualified candidates — Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias — prayed, and cast lots; the lot fell on Matthias, “and he was counted with the eleven apostles.” He is named only once in the New Testament and is never mentioned again; everything later said about his missions and death is legend.

Why was Matthias chosen to replace Judas?

Because the apostolic office had been vacated and the symbolic number of the Twelve — answering to the twelve tribes of Israel — had to be restored before Pentecost. Peter applied Psalm 109:8, “May another take his office,” to Judas’s empty place, and set the qualification: the replacement had to have accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry, “beginning from the baptism of John until the day on which he was taken up,” so as to be a witness to the Resurrection. Matthias met that criterion.

What does it mean that Matthias was “chosen by lot”?

The assembly did not vote or let Peter appoint a man; it prayed that God, “who know[s] the hearts of all,” would show his choice, and then cast lots, reading the outcome as God’s decision — exactly as Proverbs 16:33 teaches: “Into the bag the lot is cast, but from the LORD comes every decision.” John Chrysostom noted that the lot was used because “the spirit was not yet sent”; the election of Matthias is, in fact, the last casting of lots recorded in the Bible. After Pentecost, the Church discerns by the Holy Spirit, not by lot.

Was the choice of Matthias a mistake, and was Paul the “real” twelfth apostle?

A minority of Protestant commentators, most notably G. Campbell Morgan, have argued that the apostles acted prematurely and that Paul was God’s intended replacement. The mainstream of both the Catholic and Protestant traditions rejects this. The text says God chose Matthias through the lot, in answer to prayer; the “silence” objection proves nothing, since most of the Twelve are never heard from again; and Paul, by his own account “born abnormally,” could never have met the eyewitness qualification, because he had not followed Jesus during the earthly ministry. Paul was an apostle of an extraordinary kind, added to the Twelve rather than numbered among them. Matthias took Judas’s place, not Paul’s.

How did Matthias die?

It is unknown, and the traditions contradict one another. The Western tradition says he was stoned and then beheaded with an axe at Jerusalem — the source of the axe he carries in art. The Eastern tradition says he was crucified in Colchis (on the Black Sea coast of modern Georgia). A third account, attributed to Hippolytus, says he died of old age in Jerusalem. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia concludes that all information about his death is “vague and contradictory.”

When is the feast of Saint Matthias?

In the current General Roman Calendar, the feast is May 14, moved there in the 1969 reform so that it falls in Eastertide near the Ascension, fitting the timing of his election. In the traditional Roman calendar and the Extraordinary Form, the feast is February 24 (and February 25 in leap years). The Eastern Orthodox churches commemorate him on August 9.

Footnotes

1. 1. Acts 1:13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE (New American Bible Revised Edition) is the canonical English Catholic translation used in the United States.

2. 2. Acts 1:15 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The "one hundred and twenty" is the quorum required by Jewish law to form a community with its own council, a detail Luke likely intends.

3. 3. Acts 1:16 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

4. 4. Acts 1:18–19 (NABRE). The notice that Judas "falling headlong … burst open in the middle" differs from Matt 27:5, where Judas hangs himself; the NABRE note observes that "Luke records a popular tradition about the death of Judas that differs from the one in Mt 27:5." On the two accounts and the Church's refusal to harmonize them facilely, see Judas Iscariot.

5. 5. Acts 1:20 (NABRE), quoting Ps 69:26 and Ps 109:8; bible.usccb.org.

6. 6. The Greek of Acts 1:20 reads tēn episkopēn autou labetō heteros (τὴν ἐπισκοπὴν αὐτοῦ λαβέτω ἕτερος), "let another take his episkopē." The same root underlies episkopos (overseer/bishop); the Septuagint of Ps 108:8 (= MT 109:8) supplies the word. The translation of episkopē as "office" (so NABRE, RSV) rather than "bishopric" (so KJV) is the more cautious rendering and is followed here.

7. 7. Acts 1:21–22 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

8. 8. Acts 1:23 (NABRE). "Barsabbas" means "son of the Sabbath" or "son of the elder"; "Justus" is a Latin cognomen. The triple naming distinguishes this Joseph from others.

9. 9. J. E. Jacquier, "St. Matthias," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1911): "Matthias … is a name derived from Mattathias, Hebrew Mattithiah, signifying 'gift of Yahweh,'" newadvent.org.

10. 10. Eusebius, Church History 1.12.3, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 1, trans. A. C. McGiffert: "Matthias, also, who was numbered with the apostles in the place of Judas, and the one who was honored by being made a candidate with him, are likewise said to have been deemed worthy of the same calling with the seventy," newadvent.org. Eusebius reports the tradition on the authority of Clement of Alexandria.

11. 11. Acts 1:24–26 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

12. 12. Prov 16:33 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE note explains the underlying practice: "a human being puts the dice in the bag but what emerges from the bag is the Lord's decision." Acts 1:26 alludes to this verse (so the NABRE cross-reference).

13. 13. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 3 (on Acts 1:13–26), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 11, newadvent.org.

14. 14. Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 3: "why did it not rest with Peter to make the election himself … that he might not seem to bestow it of favor. And besides, he was not yet endowed with the spirit," newadvent.org.

15. 15. Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 3, newadvent.org (emphasis in the parenthesis is Chrysostom's own).

16. 16. Acts 6:3–6 (NABRE), the appointment of the seven, by selection and the laying on of hands rather than by lot, bible.usccb.org.

17. 17. Acts 13:2 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The contrast between Acts 1 (the lot) and Acts 6 and 13 (the Spirit) is the standard ground for the observation that the casting of lots ceases after Pentecost.

18. 18. 1 Cor 15:8–9 (NABRE): "Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me. For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God," bible.usccb.org.

19. 19. G. Campbell Morgan, The Acts of the Apostles (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1924), commentary on Acts 1:6–26. Morgan is the most prominent named proponent of the "wrong choice" reading; the view is otherwise associated with portions of the dispensationalist and Plymouth Brethren tradition, though it is frequently misattributed (the Scofield Reference Bible's note on Acts 1, for instance, does not in fact criticize the election).

20. 20. David Guzik, Enduring Word Bible Commentary, Acts 1, enduringword.com.

21. 21. Acts 1:24 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

22. 22. John Calvin, Commentary upon the Acts of the Apostles, on Acts 1:15, trans. Christopher Fetherstone, ed. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), ccel.org.

23. 23. On apostolic succession as a doctrine, and Acts 1 as its first scriptural instance, see Apostolic Succession.

24. 24. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 860, vatican.va.

25. 25. CCC 861: "In order that the mission entrusted to them might be continued after their death, [the apostles] consigned, by will and testament, as it were, to their immediate collaborators the duty of completing and consolidating the work they had begun … They accordingly designated such men and then made the ruling that likewise on their death other proven men should take over their ministry," vatican.va.

26. 26. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (1964), 20, vatican.va.

27. 27. For the fair-minded acknowledgment that episkopē in Acts 1:20 is general and that the case for succession is cumulative rather than resting on a single word, see C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), on Acts 1:15–26.

28. 28. Matt 19:28 (NABRE); cf. Luke 22:30, "you will … sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel," bible.usccb.org.

29. 29. NABRE note on Acts 1:26, bible.usccb.org.

30. 30. Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 3: the witness was to be ordained "that their college might not be left mutilated," newadvent.org.

31. 31. Rev 21:14 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org; cf. CCC 865, which quotes the verse: "the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb."

32. 32. On the Traditions and the disputed Gospel of Matthias, and the Zahn–Harnack debate over whether they are one work or two, see Jacquier, "St. Matthias," newadvent.org, and the discussion in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, which concludes that "there is too little evidence to decide this question definitively."

33. 33. The saying is preserved in Clement, Stromata 3.4.26, and reproduced verbatim by Eusebius, Church History 3.29.4 (NPNF, McGiffert): "they say that Matthias also taught … that we ought to fight against and abuse the flesh, and not give way to it for the sake of pleasure, but strengthen the soul by faith and knowledge," newadvent.org. The Nicolaitans cited the saying in defense of the opposite practice.

34. 34. Clement, Stromata 2.9.45, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, trans. William Wilson, newadvent.org. The ANF prints the apostle's name here as "Matthew"; the Greek and modern critical editions read "Matthias" (see note 37).

35. 35. Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 7.20: Basilides and his son Isidore claimed to transmit "secret words" received by Matthias in private from the Savior; cf. Clement, Stromata 7.17.108, on the Basilidian appeal to Matthias.

36. 36. Eusebius, Church History 3.25.6 (NPNF, McGiffert), listing among the heretical forgeries "the Gospels of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias, or of any others," newadvent.org.

37. 37. So Clement, Stromata 4.6.35 (ANF, Wilson): "Zaccheus, or, according to some, Matthew, the chief of the publicans," newadvent.org, where the Greek reads "Matthias." The ANF renders the name "Matthew" at Strom. 2.9.45, 4.6.35, and 7.13.82, and "Matthias" only at 3.4.26 — itself a small monument to the very confusion described here.

38. 38. Jacquier, "St. Matthias," newadvent.org. On Matthew, with whom Matthias is repeatedly confused, see Saint Matthew the Apostle.

39. 39. Nicephorus Callistus, Ecclesiastical History 2.40, as quoted in Jacquier, "St. Matthias": Matthias "first preached the Gospel in Judea, then in Ethiopia (that is to say, Colchis) and was crucified," newadvent.org.

40. 40. Synopsis of pseudo-Dorotheus, Latin text quoted in Jacquier, "St. Matthias," newadvent.org: "Matthias in interiore Æthiopia, ubi Hyssus maris portus et Phasis fluvius est … Mortuus est autem in Sebastopoli, ibique prope templum Solis sepultus." Hyssus and the river Phasis lie on the Colchian (Black Sea) coast of modern Georgia.

41. 41. On the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (or Mermedonia), its fourth- or fifth-century date, the Matthias/Matthew confusion in its manuscript tradition, and its descent into the Old English Andreas (Vercelli Book), see the e-Clavis entry "Acts of Andrew and Matthias," nasscal.com; the critical edition is Dennis R. MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1990).

42. 42. On the Western legend (stoning followed by beheading with an axe) and the axe as Matthias's attribute in art, see Richard Stracke, "St. Matthias: The Iconography," christianiconography.info: "He was tried before the High Priest and condemned to be stoned to death. When this method miraculously failed, he was killed with an axe."

43. 43. Jacquier, "St. Matthias," newadvent.org. The third tradition, that Matthias died of old age in Jerusalem, is attributed to Hippolytus.

44. 44. St. Matthias' Abbey (Abtei St. Matthias), Trier, is described as holding the tomb of the apostle and being "the only burial of an apostle in Germany and north of the Alps"; see the abbey's history at abteistmatthias.de.

45. 45. The relics venerated as Matthias's were "discovered" at Trier in 1127 during work on the abbey church, after which it became a major pilgrimage center; the Romanesque basilica was dedicated in 1148. The Helena provenance is traditional and should be received with corresponding caution given the long interval.

46. 46. Jacquier, "St. Matthias," newadvent.org: "It is said that St. Helena brought the relics of St. Matthias to Rome, and that a portion of them was at Trier. Bollandus doubts if the relics that are in Rome are not rather those of the St. Matthias who was Bishop of Jerusalem about the year 120, and whose history would seem to have been confounded with that of the Apostle."

47. 47. A further portion of relics is claimed by the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua; a marker at the Roman fortress of Gonio (Apsaros), near Batumi in Georgia, identifies a grave there as the apostle's, though excavation has not confirmed it and local accounts vary between "Matthias" and "Matthew."

48. 48. On the February 24 feast and its transfer to February 25 in leap years, see Gregory DiPippo, "Why is the Feast of St Matthias Moved in Leap Years?", New Liturgical Movement (Feb. 24, 2016), newliturgicalmovement.org. February 24 is the ante diem sextum Kalendas Martias; a leap year doubles that "sixth day" (hence bissextilis), and Matthias's feast keeps the second of the two.

49. 49. The feast was moved to May 14 in the 1969 reform of the General Roman Calendar so that it would fall outside Lent and near the Ascension; see "Is Saint Matthias' feast celebrated on February 24 or May 14?", EWTN, ewtn.com. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, written before the change, gives only the older date and carries an editorial note recording the move.

50. 50. The Eastern Orthodox churches commemorate the Apostle Matthias on August 9; see "Apostle Matthias of the Seventy," Orthodox Church in America, oca.org.

51. 51. Matthias's patronage of carpenters, tailors, and others who work with edged tools follows from the axe of his Western martyrdom legend; he is also popularly invoked against alcoholism. The patronages are recorded in the standard saints' calendars.