The answer to the question “Was Matthew a tax collector?” carries a lot more historical and cultural weight than you might think. Tax collectors were viewed as traitors. Collaborators with Rome. These were among the most publicly disgraced figures in Jewish society.
The Bottom Line
All three synoptic gospels explicitly identify Matthew as a tax collector. Aside from the banquet held at his house, scripture offers nothing on his earlier life.
I find myself captivated by the New Testament stories of Jesus’ first followers. I enjoy slowing down and tracing how scripture, historical tradition, and our modern assumptions can help shape the answer to questions that scripture only answers indirectly. The same approach guided my work on the disciples’ ages. And, the process of sitting with a figure like Matthew and asking who he actually was grows my faith.
Relevant Scriptures
Matthew 9:9, Mark 2:14, Luke 5:27 Each of the synoptic gospels present Matthew (or Levi) as a tax collector at the time of his calling.
Matthew 10:2-4 Matthew lists himself among the Twelve, including the label “the tax collector.”
Luke 19:1-10 The interaction with Zacchaeus shows public sentiment toward tax collectors, and uses a different Greek title (architelones) for the chief collector.
Biblical Context
If you ever thought the American tax system was bad, just know that it was SO much worse in Roman Judea. Every few years, the empire auctioned off the right to collect taxes in a given region to wealthy Roman citizens. Those high-ranking citizens (or associations of them) paid a large, immediate sum for the right to “farm” the taxes. Then, they unleashed a privatized network of sanctioned tax collectors and thugs to squeeze every last drop of profit out of their jurisdiction.
The Roman citizens who bought these tax contracts were called publicani. Dr. Leonhard Schmitz, in his article on Publicani, explains that in the late Republic and early Empire they were typically drawn from the equestrian order, the Roman citizens of knightly rank just below the Senate. Professor Ramsay makes the scale of the operation clear in his Manual of Roman Antiquities (p. 238):
“To farm the Revenues, or even a portion of the Revenues, of a large Province, required an immense establishment of slaves and subordinates of every kind, as well as vast warehouses for storing, and fleets of merchantmen for transporting from place to place, the produce collected.”
Matthew, sitting at a toll booth in Capernaum, would have been nowhere near the top of that organization. He was at the bottom. The publicani were the investors. Matthew was one of the local Jewish collaborators hired to do the actual collecting, fleecing his neighbors every day at the booth.
That distinction matters, and it is one I think most readers miss. The Jewish Virtual Library entry on tax gatherers notes a difference between the mokhesin (collectors of customs, tolls, and market taxes) and the gabba’im (collectors of civil taxes). Both were despised, but both were local. In Greek, both went by the word that the gospels use for Matthew: telones.
So, when the gospel writers call Matthew a tax collector, let’s be clear. They are not calling him a Roman aristocrat. He’s the boots on the ground near the bottom of the tax-farming food chain.
Language Notes
τελώνης telones This is the word Matthew, Mark, and Luke all use for Matthew’s profession. Strong’s 5057 glosses it as “a farmer of the taxes and revenues,” but the common usage in the gospels is the subordinate collector, not the contract holder. It names a profession and signals a social stigma at the same time.
ἀρχιτελώνης architelones This is the title Luke uses for Zacchaeus in Luke 19:2, and it is the only time it appears in the New Testament. Strong’s 754 defines it as “a chief tax collector.” The prefix archi- (chief) points to Zacchaeus having a superior office. Scripture does not give Matthew that title.
Rabbinic View
Rabbinic literature is consistently hard on tax collectors. The Mishnah lumps them in with robbers and murderers when discussing ritual defilement. Mishnah Bava Kamma 10:1 treats money from a tax collector as presumptively stolen. The Talmud, in Sanhedrin 25b, disqualifies tax collectors from serving as witnesses. That is not just social distaste. That is a legal judgment that a tax collector’s word cannot be trusted in court.
The anxiety underneath those rulings was real. A tax collector was handling Roman coinage stamped with an emperor’s image, working for a foreign power, and profiting off his own neighbors.
In rabbinic terms, Matthew was compromised at the level of daily practice.
That sharpens the shock of Jesus eating at Matthew’s house in Matthew 9:10. It was a meal shared with the worst of the worst.
Early Church Fathers
The early church accepted Matthew’s former profession. Jerome referred to the author of Matthew as “Matthew, who is also Levi, and from a publican came to be an apostle.” He treats the identification of Matthew with Levi as settled.
Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew 9, highlights the same move. In his Homily 30 on Matthew, he marvels that Jesus did not merely call Matthew, but immediately honored him with table fellowship. For Chrysostom, the social offense is not a flaw in the story. It is the whole point of the story.
My Opinion
Where I have landed is this. Matthew was a tax collector, exactly as the synoptics say, but he was likely not very senior. The gap between telones and architelones supports it, and the cultural context also supports it. Matthew is admittedly the hardest for me to reconcile with my view on the ages of the disciples.
Conclusion
Was Matthew a tax collector? Yes. The synoptics say so plainly, the Greek vocabulary confirms it, and the early church never tried to deny it. What changes is what you may think the label meant. He was a low-rung Jewish collaborator working the toll booth, denied participation with his own community.
That is the man Jesus looked at and said, “Follow me.” The calling lands harder when you see just how far down the ladder he was reaching.
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