Levi the Publican

Before he was an apostle and an evangelist, Matthew was a telōnēs — a tax-collector seated at a customs-post in or near Capernaum, a member of the most despised trade in Jewish Galilee. This file sets out the world of the Roman tax-farmers, the social and religious stigma that attached to the publican, and what the Gospels’ insistence on Matthew’s former office tells us about the man Christ called and the mercy the Gospel proclaims.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Office of the Tax-Collector

The Greek word the Gospels use for Matthew’s former occupation is telōnēs (τελώνης), rendered “publican” in the older English versions and “tax-collector” in the modern. He is found “sitting at the tax office” (Matt. 9:9; Greek epi to telōnion) — the customs-booth or toll-station where duties were levied on goods in transit (The Holy Gospel according to Matthew 9:9; cf. Mark 2:14; Luke 5:27). Capernaum, on the north-western shore of the Sea of Galilee, lay on a trade route near the border between the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas and that of Philip, and a toll-station there would have collected customs on the traffic passing between the two domains and the caravan road to Damascus. Matthew, then, was most likely not a collector of the head-tax or land-tax paid directly to Rome but a customs-officer in the service of Herod Antipas’s revenue system, which in the broad sense the Gospels and their hearers lumped together with the Roman fiscal apparatus.

The Roman provincial tax system of the late Republic and early Empire was built on tax-farming: the right to collect a region’s revenues was sold at auction to publicani, who paid the state in advance and then recouped the sum, with profit, from the population. By the first century the great corporations of publicani had been curtailed in the direct taxes, but the indirect taxes — customs, tolls, market dues — were still commonly farmed out, and the local collectors who manned the booths were the visible face of the system. Their income came from collecting more than they owed, and the absence of fixed published rates made extortion easy and routine; this is precisely the abuse that John the Baptist confronts when tax-collectors come to be baptized and he tells them, “Collect no more than is appointed you” (Luke 3:12–13).

The Stigma of the Publican

In Jewish Galilee the tax-collector was doubly compromised, and the Gospels register the contempt without softening it. He was, first, a collaborator: an agent of an occupying or client power, drawing the wealth of his own people into the service of Rome and the Herodians. He was, second, presumed dishonest, since the trade rewarded extortion; and he was, third, ritually suspect, because his work brought him into constant contact with Gentiles and with goods and persons that rendered him, in the eyes of the strict, unclean. Rabbinic sources of a later period group tax-collectors with robbers and treat their money as the proceeds of plunder, and the New Testament reflects the same low estimate: the publican is the standing companion of the “sinner.”

The Gospels use the pairing “tax-collectors and sinners” as a fixed category of the outcast. When Matthew gives a banquet, “many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples” (Matt. 9:10), and the Pharisees ask the disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matt. 9:11). The Lord twice cites the publican as the type of the disreputable: “if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (Matt. 18:17), and “the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:31). The parable of the Pharisee and the publican turns on the same contempt, the tax-collector standing “far off,” not daring to lift his eyes, and going down to his house justified (Luke 18:9–14). To be a telōnēs was to be, in the religious sociology of the time, on the far side of the line that divided the righteous from the lost.

It is against this background that the Church has always read the call of Matthew. Chrysostom, opening his Homilies on Matthew, marvels that the writer of the First Gospel was a publican, and makes the point that the evangelist himself does not conceal it: where Mark and Luke veil the man under the name “Levi,” Matthew, in the list of the Twelve, brands himself with his old trade — “Matthew the tax collector” (Matt. 10:3) — a humility Chrysostom reads as the mark of a soul that glories not in its dignity but in the mercy that raised it (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, Homily 30 [on Matt. 9:9]; trans. Prevost/Riddle, NPNF I/10).

“I Came Not to Call the Righteous, but Sinners”

The theological weight the Gospels place on Matthew’s office is summed in the saying that follows his call and banquet. To the Pharisees’ complaint that he eats with tax-collectors and sinners, Jesus answers, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick… For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13), adding the citation, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’” (Matt. 9:13, quoting Hos. 6:6). The appeal to Hosea is characteristically Matthean — the Gospel cites it again at 12:7 — and it discloses why the publican’s call stands where it does in the Gospel’s structure: it is the enacted proof that the Physician has come for the sick, that mercy outranks ritual exactness, and that the Kingdom is opened first to those whom the religious establishment had written off. The most despised man in the Galilean order is made the very type of the called sinner.

For the Orthodox tradition the figure of Levi the publican is therefore not merely a biographical preliminary but a permanent icon of repentance. The liturgical texts for November 16 dwell on the wonder that “the publican became an evangelist,” that the hand which had counted unjust gain was made to write the good news, and that Christ “did not despise the tax-gatherer but called him” (hymnography for the feast of the Apostle Matthew; cf. the parallel use of the Pharisee-and-publican parable to open the Lenten Triodion). The office that made Matthew an outcast becomes, in the Church’s memory, the measure of the mercy that called him — the sinner singled out, the despised trade abandoned at a word, the customs-booth left behind for the Kingdom of heaven.

See Also

References

  • The Holy Gospel according to Matthew 9:9–13; 10:3; 18:17; 21:31. With parallels Mark 2:14–17; Luke 5:27–32; 18:9–14; 3:12–13. Cited by chapter and verse.
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, Homily 30 (on Matt. 9:9). Trans. George Prevost, rev. M. B. Riddle. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 10. Buffalo, 1888.
  • Hosea 6:6 (cited at Matt. 9:13; 12:7).
  • The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, November 16. Trans. Holy Apostles Convent, Buena Vista, CO.
  • Jeremias, Joachim. Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus. Trans. F. H. and C. H. Cave. London: SCM, 1969 (on tax-collectors and the social outcast).