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As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station…. (v. 9)

When the first fired cuneiform mudtablets were discovered in Sumer there was a great deal of curiosity about what they contained. What ancient insights would they reveal? And while it is true that such ancient classics as the Epic of Gilgamesh and his failed search for immortality still touches us today, as well as the hymns by the high priestess of the moon, Princess Enheduanna, for the most part the writing revealed royal tax records.

Tax records are an essential part of the records preserved from the ancient world. And it wasn’t just cuneiform. Every ancient society that left behind writings left behind tax records, receipts, and past due notices.

Some of the most interesting tax records come from Egypt. Their dry climate insured that many of their papyrus records from thousands of years ago were preserved in the garbage dumps. Oddly enough, poorer people paid a higher rate of taxes. Richer individuals were often exempted from paying certain fees. Special surcharges ramped up the price for the poorer folks.

For instance, in the some of the Egyptian towns along the Nile River the imperial taxes required by Rome were required to be paid in tetradrachms – a coin that was not in circulation but minted specifically throughout the region to pay the poll-tax. People had to exchange their drachma coins for tetradrachms, for which they were charged something with the jawbreaker title of prosdiagraphomena, which came to a 6 ½ % surcharge. This fee was instituted under the reign of Augustus.

They were also charged the kollybos, a fee for exchanging copper drachmas for silver. This resulted in an added five drachma charge.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was a personal fee the scribe collected for his services, known as the sumbolikon.

One ancient Egyptian celebrated the importance of learning how to write, an essential skill for tax collectors. “Look, nothing excels writing…. The scribe, whatever his place in the residence, he cannot be poor in it.” This author reminded the reader that reed-cutters were plagued by mosquitoes, brick layers were both filthy and exhausted, those who washed clothes and worked along the shore of the Nile were neighbors to crocodiles, coppersmiths smelled worse than fish eggs and had “fingers like crocodile skin,” and that farmers lived in a state of exhaustion.

He concluded, “If you know how to write, that is a better life for you than these professions I describe…Look, no scribe will ever be lacking in food….”

The word for tax collecting, apographe, means simply “to write down,” and write down is what tax collectors did.

The taxes paid by Judeans in the first Christian century were especially galling to the residents of the region, because these taxes paid for the cost of the highly resented occupation of the region by the Roman legionnaires. The tax collector, though often a local person, represented the faceless, implacable, impersonal, unresponsive, but all powerful might of Rome. Because of the efficiency of the system, there was not a corner of the empire which escaped this burden. If you lived under Roman rule, you paid the taxes.

And since the tax collector paid the taxes for the entire region, then collected them piecemeal from the residents, they were allowed to charge a markup to make a profit. And since no one but the tax collector had access to his records, it was assumed, not always incorrectly, that the tax collector was gouging them.

The Jewish/Roman historian Josephus records futile rebellions by the Galileans and Judeans against the hated taxes and the hated Romans. Gamaliel the Pharisee, a member of the Jewish council, alludes to one of these rebellions when he says, “…Judas the Galilean rose up at the time of the census and got people to follow him; he also perished, and all who followed him were scattered.” (Acts 5:-37)

Which makes it all the more surprising that when Jesus looked for disciples, he deliberately chose a man named Matthew, a scribe who could write, sitting at his tax collecting station, immediately recognizable as the hated tax collector who stopped people and demanded payment, to be one of his apostles. It’s even more astounding when you consider that another apostle was referred to as Simon the Zealot, one of those militarily opposed to paying taxes. (Luke 6:12)

(Want to know more? Information can be found in “Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament” by Sabine R. Huebner, Cambridge University Press, 2019, “City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World,” by Peter Parsons, Phoenix, 2007, Greek Documentary Papyri From Egypt in the Berlin Aegyptisches Museum, by Nahum Cohen, American Society of Papyrologists, 2007.)