Calling of Matthew. The Calling of Matthew is an episode in the life of Jesus which appears in all three synoptic gospels, Matthew 9:9-13, Mark 2:13-17 and Luke 5:27-28, and relates the initial encounter between Jesus and Matthew, the tax collector who became a disciple.
According to the Gospel of Matthew: As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
A tax collector could be either an independent contractor with the Roman government, who paid a fee to Rome to obtain the right to extract taxes from the people in a certain area, with an added fee for the collector and his employees; or he might have also been a toll collector for Herod Antipas, Capernaum was an area with a high traffic of people and merchants. In any case, Levi-Matthew would have been a very unpopular individual.
The Greek: is often translated as the tax collector's booth or tax office. The King James Version says Matthew was sitting at the receipt of custom.
Wycliffe's translation was sitting in a tollbooth, and the Expanded Bible suggests that the telonion was probably a tariff booth for taxing goods in transit. In all three synoptic gospels, this episode takes place shortly after the miracle of healing the paralytic at Capernaum and is followed by Jesus' image of the danger of putting new wine into old wineskins. In the G
According to the Gospel of Matthew: As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
A tax collector could be either an independent contractor with the Roman government, who paid a fee to Rome to obtain the right to extract taxes from the people in a certain area, with an added fee for the collector and his employees; or he might have also been a toll collector for Herod Antipas, Capernaum was an area with a high traffic of people and merchants. In any case, Levi-Matthew would have been a very unpopular individual.
The Greek: is often translated as the tax collector's booth or tax office. The King James Version says Matthew was sitting at the receipt of custom.
Wycliffe's translation was sitting in a tollbooth, and the Expanded Bible suggests that the telonion was probably a tariff booth for taxing goods in transit. In all three synoptic gospels, this episode takes place shortly after the miracle of healing the paralytic at Capernaum and is followed by Jesus' image of the danger of putting new wine into old wineskins. In the G
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