What was the name of the tax collector who was called by Jesus?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The discrepancy is a textbook case of Matthean customization of Markan source material, and the popular 'one man, two names' harmonization, while not logically impossible, rests on a postulate with no independent attestation.

Mark 2:13-14 has Jesus, teaching by the sea, summon *Leuin ton tou Alphaiou kathēmenon epi to telōnion* — 'Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth' — with the terse *akolouthei moi*, 'follow me.' Luke 5:27-28 reproduces Mark almost word for word: a tax collector *onomati Leuin*, 'named Levi,' is called and rises to follow. Matthew 9:9 retells the identical scene — the booth, the call formula, the immediate response — but substitutes a name: *eiden anthrōpon kathēmenon epi to telōnion, Maththaion legomenon*, 'he saw a man seated at the tax booth, called Matthew.' One narrative, two names.

The strongest harmonization — Carson, France's NICNT, Bauckham, Blomberg — is the double-name theory. Levi (from the tribal/patronymic stock) was the man's given name; Matthew (*Maththaios*, from Hebrew *Mattityāhū*, 'gift of YHWH') was a second name, perhaps conferred at his call as Simon became Peter and Saul is also called Paul. Multiple names were genuinely common in first-century Jewish Palestine, where a Semitic name often coexisted with a Greek or Latin one (John Mark; Joseph Barsabbas Justus; Simon Peter/Cephas). Since the First Gospel was traditionally associated with the apostle Matthew — listed as *Maththaios ho telōnēs*, 'Matthew the tax collector,' among the Twelve at 10:3 — it would naturally narrate the call under the apostolic name. This is a serious argument and must be granted its full force: onomastic doubling is well documented, and Mark's own juxtaposition of 'Levi son of Alphaeus' (2:14) with 'James son of Alphaeus' (3:18) even raises the question of a family of Alphaeus.

The difficulty is the silence where the harmonization most needs support. There is no independent first-century attestation — none — that any individual was known by both 'Levi' and 'Matthew.' Each cited analogy is weaker than it looks. Simon→Peter is a renaming the Gospels narrate explicitly, as a name Jesus bestows (Mark 3:16; John 1:42); no comparable bestowal is reported for Levi. Saul/Paul involves two name-types (a Hebrew name and a Roman *cognomen*) and is repeatedly fixed to one person across Acts; the two are never presented as a renaming and are attested together. For Levi-Matthew, by contrast, no text ever equates the two names. The identification is precisely the thing in need of evidence, supplied only by the harmonizing hypothesis itself.

The redaction-critical reading (Davies-Allison; Luz; Marcus) offers a more economical account and turns on a genuine textual puzzle: Levi son of Alphaeus, dramatically called in Mark 2:14, never appears in Mark's own list of the Twelve at 3:16-19. A figure given a full call narrative who then vanishes from the apostolic roster is anomalous. Matthew's editor resolves the anomaly by replacing 'Levi' with 'Matthew' — a name that does stand in the Twelve — thereby anchoring the apostle (and the Gospel's namesake-tradition) in a call story that Mark had attached to a non-apostle. The substitution is the kind of purposeful editorial move Matthew makes elsewhere with his Markan source, aligning tradition with the community's apostolic claims. Fitzmyer notes the same Levi-absence problem from the Lukan side, where Levi likewise does not reappear among the Twelve.

Nothing here proves the man was not also called Matthew; people did bear two names. But the harmonization succeeds only by assuming the very identification the texts never make, while the redactional explanation accounts for both the name-change and the otherwise puzzling disappearance of Levi from the apostle lists.

Where the critical reading lands: not harmonized — the two-name theory is logically possible but historically unsupported; the parsimonious reading is a Matthean redactional substitution anchoring the apostle Matthew in Mark's call narrative.