; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 56869. For example, the Valentinian theologian Heracleon differentiated Levi from Matthew (cf. Vose Seminary Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. This creates space between Peter and the church's rock. 12.13; Is. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?, On hearing this, Jesus said to them, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. (Matt. Saint Matthew | History, Facts, Feast Day, & Death | Britannica For objections against this view, see Meier, The Vision of Matthew, 25n.26; Luz, Matthew 820, 32. This is not a solitary occurrence within Matthews Gospel: the evangelist inserted the mother of the sons of Zebedee into one pericope (Matt 20:20; cf. [28] On the contrary, there are cases when dialektos is translated as a language even when it is not preceded by an article (e.g., Philo, Mos. 3. Why Do Jesus' Middle Eastern Apostles Have Common English Names? Jesus Calls Matthew to Follow Him (Matthew 9:9-13; Mark 2:13-17; Luke 5 Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed. Matthew (also known as Levi) doubtless was one of the tax collectors who responded to John the Baptist's call to repentance. Meet the Apostle Nathanael, a 'True Israelite' - Learn Religions Jesus ate a meal at Levi's house and . [48] Frey, Die Fragmente des Nazorerevangeliums, 626; Gregory, Gospel according to the Hebrews, 50, 50n.35. T/F, 3. Vir. I. John P. Meier even entertains the option that the evangelist wanted to replace Levi with any of the apostles and Matthew was chosen at random for this aim. Matthew is the Greek name and Levi was the Hebrew name. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? On hearing this, Jesus said,It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Who Were the Magi, and Why Did They Worship Jesus? (Matthew 2) High priest Aaron and his sons were descendants of Levi (Exodus 4:14), Levi being a son of Jacob (Genesis 29:34). Both are true because Matthew and Levi are two names for the same person. 6:25 (300s AD). How do we know that Matthew changed after Jesus called him? Indeed, Levi is Israel's priestly tribe, as stated in the Bible: "The priests the Levites the priests the Levites the priests the Levites" (Deuteronomy 17:9, 17:18, 18:1). 3.2-3), but failed to place them in a rhetorically effective arrangement (taxis), whereas Matthew arranged (sunetaxato) the oracles (logia) in a Hebrew style.[21] That is, they surmise that Matthew applied Jewish exegetical techniques and forms of argumentation to the material at his disposal to shape it into a cogent presentation about how Jesus fulfilled the Scriptures. ill. (1) Repetition of names in the list after David, some of which appear to be anachronisms, possibly suggesting that this list had its own history. However, Didymus the Blind spotted a similar story in certain Gospels in his Commentary on Ecclesiastes (223.613) and one of those Gospels could have been the Gospel according to the Hebrews that he cited elsewhere in his Commentary on the Psalms (184.910). [44] Vielhauer and Strecker, Jewish Christian Gospels, 167; Klijn, Gospel Tradition, 67-68; Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 51; Jrg Frey, Die Fragmente des Ebioniterevangeliums, 612; Kok, Gospel according to the Hebrews, 39; Gregory, Gospel according to the Hebrews, 183, 222. Curiously, Origen answered the philosopher Celsus's criticism that Jesus assembled a motley crew of "toll collectors and sailors" by stressing that Matthew was the sole toll collector within the apostolic circle and that Levi was not numbered among the twelve apostles except for in select manuscripts of Mark's Gospel (Cels. See W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann, Matthew, AB (Doubleday: New York, 1971), CLXXVIII. Christ's Call To Matthew - Follow Me - Discover the Book Ministries haer. [18] Josef Krzinger and Robert Gundry have tried to line up Papiass testimony with the academic consensus. h.e. The double tradition is mostly comprised of sayings, but there are a couple of narratives (e.g., Matt 4:111/Luke 4:113; Matt 8:513/Luke 7:110). Epiphanius and Jerome later confused the traditional account of the authorship of Matthews Gospel with the origins of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Levi's work was to take the money. praef. According to Matthew 9:9 and Mark 2:14, Matthew was sitting by the customs house in Capernaum (near modern Almagor, Israel, on the Sea of Galilee) when Jesus called him into his company. [8] Alternatively, the textual variant that has James instead of Levi as the son of Alphaeus in Mark 2:14 in a handful of manuscripts was plausibly motivated by a desire for uniformity by having a single son of Alphaeus (cf. Luke 6:12-26. 4. [9] Lindars, Western Text,222; cf. Logion could be translated as an oracle or divine utterance. Both Eusebius and Epiphanius missed Irenaeuss point that schismatics rejected the fourfold Gospel canon and selected one of the four Gospels, but their doctrines were refuted by the very Gospels that they privileged. Supported by: A survey of the ancient traditions about how the evangelist Matthew wrote his Gospel in Aramaic for a Jewish audience before it was translated into Greek suggests that the modern assumptions about the Apostles fluency in Greek or education in rhetorical composition may not have necessarily been shared by the Patristic intelligentsia. There were only 8 people in Noahs Ark. St. Matthew (Matthew 9:10) modestly says, "in the house," keeping himself as much as possible in the background.St. Saint Matthew made a very small decision at the time that ended up not only affecting his life, and the people of his time, but he made a choice that affected all of mankind in the future as well. 30.13.45), indicating that it was published in Greek at the outset. 1.8.1; Clement, str. At the same time, opposition against Jesus was growing stronger, especially from the religious . For example, the Valentinian theologian Heracleon differentiated Levi from Matthew (cf. Jerome may have anticipated that he would track down the Gospel according to the Hebrews in Pamphilus library in Caesarea (cf. Ps. Richard Bauckham makes it clear why these examples may be irrelevant to this case: "[I]f Matthew and Levi were the same person, we should be confronted with the virtually unparalleled phenomenon of a Palestinian Jew bearing two common Semitic personal names (Matthew: ninth most popular, 62 occurrences; Levi: seventeenth most popular, 25 occurrences). Gundry, Matthew, xxii. Gundry takes the referent to be the expositors who expounded on Matthews text. Some Patristic interpreters guessed that the evangelists Mark and Luke called Matthew by his less popular name Levi out of deference for his apostolic status, while Matthew himself had the humility to confess that he was once employed in a disreputable profession under his better-known name (e.g., John Chrysostom, When Origen of Alexandria searched for a parallel for why Saul was surnamed Paul in the preface of his. Follow me, Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him. [Matthew 9:9-13, Luke 5:27-32] 13 Jesus went to the seashore again where large crowds came to him, . Acts 7:38; Rom 3:2; Heb 5:12; 1 Pet 4:11;1 Clem. Sextus Julius AfricanusWhy Did The Magi Come ? Yet our access to Papias is mediated through Eusebius, so it is uncertain whether Eusebius interrupted an interconnected statement about both evangelists or juxtaposed two separate excerpts from Papias together. Both books are addressed to the same persona man named Theophilus. ill. 2), but several of his quotations were lifted from previous Greek texts penned by figures such as Ignatius (cf. In Matthew, because of the use of Q and Matthew's theological organization, there is stress on Jesus as teacher, his sharpening or radicalizing of the Law in an eschatological context; and Jesus is presented not in secret but as an openly proclaimed Messiah, King, and Judge. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Matthew, McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia - Biography of Matthew, Catholic Online - Biography of St. Matthew, Catholic Information Network - St. Matthew Apostle and Evangelist. The Calling of Saint Matthew depicts the moment from Matthew 9:9 when Jesus passes by Matthew, a tax collector, and says 'Follow me.' Matthew (also called Levi) did so and became one of Jesus . [35] For the general consensus of Q scholars, see Nigel Turner, Q in Recent Thought ExpTim 80 (1968-69): 32428; John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1987), 5164; Harry T. Fleddermann, Q: A Reconstruction and Commentary (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 15557; Sarah E. Rollens, Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project in the Sayings Gospel Q (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 9193. This is a quite different case from that of an individual having both a Semitic and a Greek or Latin name, as well as from that of an individual having a Semitic name and also a nickname or family name."[7]. "Follow Me" | Desiring God He offered something infinitely better. It is beyond the scope of this paper to determine why Matthew was substituted for Levi. Matthew, the Apostle of Yahshua (Popularly known as Jesus Christ) is best known as the publican or tax collector. CHICAGO (RNS) The first time the Rev. This is very possible, as scholars point to Simon (Peter) and Saul. He left Judea and carried the Gospel to Ethiopia where he was martyred while celebrating a mass at the altar of a small church he had started. His presence is here, worship with us at Summer Ramp now - facebook.com On the other hand, the oldest quotations from the Gospel according to the Hebrews were not attributed to a named author (e.g., Clement, str. Whatever the case, Jerome slowly distanced himself from his earlier confident declarations that the Nazarenes had the original Matthean Gospel in their possession (cf. To follow Jesus requires renouncement. He may call peop For the range of theories accounting for the redactional changes in Matthew 9:9 and 10:3, see the helpful summaries compiled by Joachim Gnilka, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Part I: Palestine 330 BCE 200 CE. The Western reading attested in Codex Bezae that switched Thaddaeus with Lebbaeus, the Latinized form of Levi, in the list of the twelve apostles in Mark 3:18, influenced the textual transmission of Matthew 10:3. Even Jesus acknowledges the hatred people had for tax collectors: " If they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector" (Matthew 18:17). The Pharisees asked them, Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? On hearing this, Jesus said to them, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. His symbol is an angel, and he is a patron saint of tax collectors and accountants. [37] See B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (London: MacMillan, 1924). I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners., CLICK HERE for Jesus and the Pharisees article. T/F, 4. Phil. F. C. Burkitt, Levi Son of Alphaeus. Updates? Levi: Luke 5:27, "And after that He went out, and noticed a tax-gatherer named Levi, sitting in the tax office, and He said to him, 'Follow Me.' ". Ps. For a recent effort to argue that plural Aramaic and Greek sources underlie the double tradition, see Maurice Casey, An Aramaic Approach to Q: Sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).