THIS MIGHT SURPRISE YOU

Jesus calls a tax collector away from his tax-collection station with the words "Follow me." In which Gospel is that man named Matthew?

The answer

Matthew, and only Matthew. In Matthew 9:9 the man at the tax-collection station is "a man called Matthew." Mark 2:14 tells the same scene with "Levi son of Alphaeus," and Luke 5:27 has "a tax collector named Levi." The call is the same in all three: "Follow me."

Why it’s interesting

For centuries readers took the different name as a hint about who wrote the Gospel. Most scholars now hold that the writer was someone other than the disciple Matthew, partly because the book copies so much of its wording from Mark's Gospel.

Scholarly consensus

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