Apostle Matthias

Matthias, whose name is a form of the Hebrew Mattathias meaning 'gift of the Lord,' is known from the New Testament as the disciple chosen to restore the number of the Twelve after the death of Judas Iscariot. The sole canonical account of his selection appears in the Acts of the Apostles (1:15-26). After the Ascension of Jesus, Peter addressed a gathering of about one hundred and twenty believers in Jerusalem and argued that a witness to the Lord's ministry, from the baptism of John until the Ascension, should take Judas's place in the apostolic college. Two men were put forward: Joseph called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias. The community prayed that God would show which of the two He had chosen, then cast lots; the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was numbered with the eleven apostles. The New Testament does not mention him again by name.

Beyond this episode, historically verifiable details of Matthias's life are extremely scarce. He is not named in the Gospels, and later writers sometimes confused him with the evangelist Matthew. Early Christian authors refer to a now-lost Gospel of Matthias, which Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius of Caesarea mention and which later ecclesiastical lists treated as apocryphal. Clement of Alexandria also preserves a few sayings attributed to Matthias, emphasizing struggle against the flesh. Hippolytus of Rome, in a brief notice on the Twelve, identified Matthias as one of the Seventy disciples, stated that he preached in Jerusalem, and reported that he died and was buried there. Other ancient and medieval traditions, however, send him far afield: some Greek and Georgian sources place his mission in Colchis on the eastern Black Sea, in the region of modern Georgia, while other accounts speak of work in Cappadocia or in Ethiopia, a name that in late antique usage could denote various lands beyond the Roman frontier.

Reports of his death are contradictory and cannot be reconciled into a single historically secure narrative. One Western strand of legend holds that he was stoned by opponents in Judea and then beheaded; another, associated with the East, describes martyrdom in Colchis; Hippolytus's notice, by contrast, implies a peaceful death in Jerusalem. No contemporary source records a year of birth or of death. Relics attributed to him have been claimed by several churches. According to Western tradition, remains said to be his were translated in the Middle Ages to the Benedictine abbey at Trier in Germany, which still bears his name; other relics have been associated with the basilica of Santa Giustina in Padua. These identifications rest on medieval translations and local cult rather than on first-century evidence.

In the liturgy Matthias has long been commemorated as an apostle. In the Roman Rite his feast was kept on 24 February until the calendar reform of 1969, which moved it to 14 May so that it would fall outside Lent. The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates him on 9 August. He is invoked as a patron of carpenters and tailors, of those struggling with alcoholism, and of the city of Trier. Because he was numbered with the apostles in the apostolic age, he has been venerated as a saint from the earliest centuries of the Church without a formal process of canonization of the later medieval or modern type.