Matthew the Apostle

Matthew was a tax collector — meaning he worked for Rome collecting from his own people, the most despised job in first-century Galilee — and Jesus called him out of the booth. The early church credited him with the Gospel that bears his name, the most Jewish of the four, structured around five long discourses (including the Sermon on the Mount) that mirror the five books of Moses. Modern scholars argue about whether the apostle himself wrote the Greek text or stood behind an earlier Aramaic source. Either way, his Gospel is the one that became the church's main teaching text for the first thousand years. Almost every early commentary is on Matthew.