Who Was Matthew In The Bible
The short answer
Matthew appears in the Gospels as a tax collector working in Capernaum when Jesus walks past his booth and says simply, "Follow me" (Matthew 9:9). He gets up and follows. It is one of the briefest call stories in the Bible, but it carries real weight. Tax collectors in first-century Galilee worked for the occupying Roman system and were widely despised as collaborators and cheats. When Jesus calls Matthew — and then eats dinner at his house with "many tax collectors and sinners" — he is making a statement about who belongs in his company. In Mark and Luke, the same man is called Levi, which was likely a second name.
Matthew becomes one of the twelve apostles, and Christian tradition from the second century onward credits him with the Gospel that bears his name. Whatever one concludes about authorship, the Gospel of Matthew has a distinct personality: it is carefully organized, deeply rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, and built around long blocks of Jesus' teaching, including the Sermon on the Mount.
One way to answer the question of who Matthew was is to notice what his Gospel keeps insisting on. Again and again, the narrative sets two ways of living side by side: a house built on rock and a house built on sand, wheat growing alongside weeds, sheep separated from goats. These paired images all point in the same direction — that following Jesus is meant to make a person genuinely, visibly different. For a man whose own life was split in two by a single call at a tax booth, that emphasis makes a certain kind of sense. Matthew's story is the story of someone who knew firsthand that meeting Jesus divides life into before and after, and his Gospel presses that same choice on every reader.
What scholars say
In this excerpt, N. T. Wright looks at Matthew as an author, tracing how the Gospel returns again and again to paired images of judgment — rock and sand, wheat and tares, sheep and goats — to underline that Jesus meant his followers to be utterly different, reflecting God's love into the world in a new way.
“This tableau thus stands, at the end of the last long discourse in Matthew’s gospel, as the final statement of something which has been there all through. The houses on the rock and on the sand, in Matthew 7; the wheat and the tares, the good fish and the bad, in Matthew 13; and now the sheep and the goats. Matthew has highlighted the fact that Jesus intended his followers to be utterly different, people who reflected God and his love in a whole new way into the world. That is what will ultimately count. There will be surprises all round when the things people have done without thinking about them turn out to reveal their deepest characters. But there will be no doubt which of the two ways of being human is the genuine article.”
What it means for you
Matthew's call is encouraging precisely because of who he was when it came. Jesus did not recruit him after he cleaned up his reputation; the invitation arrived at the tax booth, mid-career, mid-compromise. If you have ever felt disqualified by your history or your job or your choices, Matthew's story says the invitation can still reach you there.
At the same time, his Gospel does not let following Jesus stay comfortable. Its recurring picture of two kinds of lives — rock or sand, wheat or weeds — asks a quiet, searching question: is my faith actually changing how I live? Matthew answered with his feet. He got up and followed.
In context
Matthew's call comes in Matthew 9:9-13, in the middle of a run of healing stories that show Jesus' authority over sickness, sin, and social boundaries. Immediately after calling Matthew, Jesus shares a meal with tax collectors and sinners, and when the Pharisees object, he answers that the sick need a physician, not the healthy. The scene sits within the larger sweep of the Gospel, which alternates between action and five long teaching discourses — from the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5-7 to the final discourse ending with the sheep and the goats in chapter 25.