Monday, November 16

Apostolic · 1st century

Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew

Evangelist and former tax collector

Sitting at the customs booth in Capernaum — a tax collector, despised as a collaborator — Matthew, also called Levi, heard two words, 'follow me,' rose, and left everything. The feast he then gave, where Jesus ate with publicans and sinners and answered the scandalized with 'I came not to call the righteous,' is the Gospel in miniature, and the Church loves that its teller was himself the proof. From Papias in the early second century, tradition names him author of the first Gospel, saying he compiled the Lord's sayings 'in the Hebrew dialect'; the relation of that note to our Greek Matthew is debated by scholars, but the Church's ascription is ancient and unbroken. His Gospel, with its Sermon on the Mount and fulfillment of the prophets, became the Church's teaching text. Later traditions send him to preach to the Parthians or Ethiopians, where he died a martyr.

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