Apostle and Evangelist Matthew

Gospel and Evangelist

Matthew is one of the four Evangelists, and his Gospel stands first in the New Testament canon. The early Church Father Papias reported that Matthew collected the sayings, or oracles, of the Lord in the Hebrew language. By tradition he wrote in Aramaic or Hebrew while still in Palestine; the original-language text was not preserved, though the surviving Greek is held to retain features of its Semitic source.

In Christian iconography Matthew is symbolized by a winged man, or angel, one of the four living creatures described in the Book of Revelation, a symbol later assigned to him because his Gospel opens with the human genealogy of Christ.

Mission and Martyrdom in Ethiopia

Tradition relates that Matthew founded a church in Ethiopia and that he healed the wife and son of the local ruler Fulvian, who had been afflicted by unclean spirits, a deed that drew many to the faith. The ruler, unwilling to see his subjects abandon the pagan gods, accused the apostle of sorcery and ordered his execution.

By the synaxarion account, Matthew was bound head downward and set over kindled brushwood, yet the fire did not harm him. Fulvian, still doubting, had the body placed in an iron coffin and cast into the sea, vowing that if Matthew's God preserved the body in the water as in the fire he would worship that God alone. The apostle is said to have appeared in a dream to Bishop Platon, directing him to recover the coffin from the shore, after which Fulvian repented, was baptized with the name Matthew, and in time was ordained and led the Ethiopian Church.

Relics and Veneration

The relics of the Apostle Matthew are venerated in the crypt of the Cathedral of Salerno in southern Italy. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps his feast on November 16 and commemorates him with the other apostles at the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles on June 30; the Western calendar observes him on September 21.