St. Matthew

On September 21 the Church honors Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist — the tax collector whom Jesus called from his customs post at Capernaum (Matthew 9:9). The same Gospel that names him also names his former profession, and the early Church paired that detail with his Gospel's account of the call. Mark and Luke tell the same story but call the man "Levi" — a name Matthew's own Gospel does not use of him. From at least the second century, Papias of Hierapolis is cited by Eusebius as the first witness that "Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could."

Early Church Fathers including Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria hold that Matthew preached the Gospel to the Jewish community in Judea before going to other lands. Almost all ancient sources name Ethiopia as the field of his later ministry, and the Golden Legend records the tradition of his martyrdom there — killed at the altar by the bodyguard of King Hirtacus for refusing to persuade the king's consecrated daughter Ephigenia to marry him. He is the patron of accountants, bankers, tax collectors, and customs officers — the saint who came from that world.

Matthew's relics reached Salerno in southern Italy in 954, brought there by way of a long medieval translation from Ethiopia. The cathedral dedicated to him — begun in 1075 by Robert Guiscard, the Norman duke — guards the Apostle's complete relics in its crypt, behind a set of bronze doors cast in Constantinople in 1099, the earliest surviving datable doors of their kind in Italy. Pilgrims who descend into Salerno's crypt stand before the marble reliquary of the Apostle whose own Gospel tells of the tax collector's moment of call: "And he rose and followed him."

In art Matthew's evangelist symbol is the winged man — the incarnation angel, for the Gospel that opens with the genealogy of Christ. Caravaggio's three paintings of the saint in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome — The Calling, The Inspiration, and The Martyrdom — are the landmark depictions of the Baroque and the strongest visual meditation on a single apostle's life painted in the West.