Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew

Matthew, also called Levi the son of Alphaeus, was a Jew of Galilee who held the customs post at Capernaum, gathering tolls on the trade road that ran from Damascus down to the Mediterranean. To his own people his trade made him an outcast, lumped together with sinners; to the Romans he was a useful man.

He was sitting at the receipt of custom when the Lord passed by and called him with a single word. The other evangelists who tell the story call him Levi at the booth and Matthew among the Twelve; he himself, in his own Gospel, gives only the name by which the disciples afterwards knew him, and adds without comment the dinner he gave at his house that night for his old colleagues, the publicans and sinners.

He travelled with the Twelve through the rest of the Lord's ministry, was numbered with them in the Acts after the Resurrection, and was present in the upper room at Pentecost. Tradition holds that he then preached among the Hebrews in Judaea for some years, during which he wrote his Gospel in their tongue, ordered around the great discourses of the Lord and arranged to show how every fulfilment had been foretold by the prophets.

Later traditions take him to Ethiopia or to Parthia, where he is said to have died a martyr's death. The relics venerated as his now lie at Salerno in southern Italy. The Church keeps him among the four evangelists, signified in the iconography by a man (or an angel), the symbol assigned him from the opening of his Gospel with the human genealogy of Christ.