Listen While You Work
Play this study as you work, drive, or rest. A simple way to keep the Word with you throughout your day, not only as a full sit-down study.
🎧 Listen to this study
Please note: this study is narrated with AI-generated audio, which may occasionally misread a Scripture reference (for example, "Acts 1 point 9" rather than "Acts 1 verse 9"). For the exact wording, please refer to your Bible.
A Day in the Life · The New Testament World
In the Gospels, "publican" is almost a curse word, spoken in the same breath as "sinner." Let us sit at the toll booth with one of these despised men, see how the Roman money machine actually worked and why his own people hated him, and then watch the astonishing thing Jesus did: He walked up and called him.
His World at a Glance
Matthew was found "at the receipt of custom," a toll station on a trade road (Matthew 9:9).
He collected tolls and customs on goods moving by road, harbor, and border, not just income.
The system let him collect more than was owed and keep the difference, which bred real extortion.
Working for Rome against his own people, he was lumped together with "sinners" (Matthew 9:11).
A "chief" tax collector like Zacchaeus could become wealthy from the trade (Luke 19:2).
Jesus called Matthew to follow and stayed at Zacchaeus's house; both were changed.
A word before we begin. The Roman tax system is well documented in broad strokes, and the Gospels give us two of these men up close, Matthew and Zacchaeus. What is certain is the toll booths, the taxing of trade, the widespread abuse, and the deep hatred these collectors earned. The exact contracts and chain of command in first-century Galilee and Judea are reconstructed from limited sources, and where we are filling in we will say so. The Scripture is our anchor and final word, and it is unsparing about these men and stunning about their Savior.
The Most Hated Man in Town
He sits at a table by the road, where the caravans and the fishermen and the farmers must pass. Rome wants its revenue, and it is his job to take it: a toll on the load of dried fish, a customs charge on the bolt of cloth, a fee on the beast and the cart. He knows the rates, but he also knows how much traffic will bear, and every coin he squeezes above what Rome requires is his to keep. The people glare as they pay. To them he is a thief with a Roman license, a Jew who serves the occupier and grows fat on his neighbors' backs. He is used to the looks. He does not expect anyone to love him.
That contempt was not unfair on its face. The word the King James Bible translates "publican" (the Greek telones) named exactly this kind of toll and tax collector, and in the Gospels it is paired again and again with "sinners," even with "harlots." A tax collector was assumed to be a cheat and a collaborator, grouped with sinners and treated as an outcast from respectable society.
Now the real questions, the ones the history and the Gospels can answer together.
The Questions You'd Actually Ask
Mostly tolls and customs on the movement of goods, not a modern income tax. Rome drew revenue in two broad ways: direct taxes on land and persons, and indirect taxes, the tolls, customs, and duties on trade. The men we meet in the Gospels sat at booths on roads, borders, and harbors and taxed what passed by. Matthew was "sitting at the receipt of custom" (Matthew 9:9) in Capernaum, a town on a trade route, when Jesus called him. In Galilee those tolls were gathered for Herod Antipas, Rome's client ruler, rather than for Rome directly. Jericho, where Zacchaeus worked, sat on major routes and rich trade, which helps explain how a chief collector there grew wealthy.
Two reasons, and both were bitter. First, they were seen as traitors: they collected money for the pagan empire and the client rulers who held the Promised Land, and profited from their own nation's servitude. Second, the system openly invited extortion. A collector paid or answered for a set amount and was largely free to gouge above it, pocketing the excess. That is why "publican" became a byword for greed and dishonesty, and why they were grouped with the worst of sinners. Jesus even used a publican as the picture of the lowest social outcast: treat an unrepentant offender, He said, "as an heathen man and a publican" (Matthew 18:17).
It was real enough that John the Baptist addressed it head-on. When tax collectors came to be baptized and asked what they should do, he did not tell them to quit; he told them to stop cheating: "Exact no more than that which is appointed you" (Luke 3:13). The problem was not the existence of the job so much as the routine overcharging built into it. And Zacchaeus's own confession assumes it: he promised to restore fourfold anything he had taken "by false accusation" (Luke 19:8), the language of a man who knew the trade's dishonesty from the inside.
An honest note: exactly how the collection was contracted in first-century Galilee and Judea, who bid, who answered to whom, is reconstructed by historians from scattered evidence and was not identical to the great tax-farming companies of an earlier Roman era. That the trade was widely abused, however, is well attested in both Jewish and Roman sources.
Barely, though we should be careful how we say it. The Gospels make his low standing unmistakable: he was grouped with "sinners," and respectable people would not share his table. Later Jewish tradition adds sharper detail, that a tax collector was counted defiled, his testimony distrusted, and his place in synagogue life closed off, but some of those specifics come from writings after the New Testament era and are debated by scholars, so we hold them loosely. What the Gospels show plainly is the contempt: it scandalized the Pharisees that Jesus would eat at a tax collector's table, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?" (Matthew 9:11). To share a meal was to accept a person, and no respectable teacher was supposed to accept these.
No. There were levels. A "chief" tax collector, an architelones like Zacchaeus, oversaw others and could indeed grow rich; Luke says plainly Zacchaeus "was rich" (Luke 19:2). But many ordinary booth-collectors were simply local men doing a despised job for a living, neither powerful nor wealthy, just permanently distrusted. What united them was not riches but reputation: whether comfortable or not, they wore the same label of traitor and cheat.
Because they were exactly the kind of people He came for, and He said so out loud. When the Pharisees grumbled at His eating with publicans and sinners, Jesus answered, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick... I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matthew 9:12–13). He let Himself be called "a friend of publicans and sinners" (Matthew 11:19) as though it were a badge, not an insult. And He told the religious elite that "the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you" (Matthew 21:31), because the despised knew they needed mercy, and the respectable did not think they did.
Where It Lands
Put the whole picture together. Here is the most despised man in town, a collaborator and a cheat, shut out of the synagogue, grouped with harlots, glared at every day. Everyone had written him off. And into that booth walked the Son of God, who did not lecture him or shame him, but said two words that changed everything: "Follow me" (Matthew 9:9). Matthew rose, left the money on the table, and became one of the twelve, and the writer of the first Gospel.
Look at Zacchaeus, because he shows what real repentance is. Jesus called him down from the tree and went to his house, and the crowd murmured that He had gone to be the guest of a sinner. But grace did its work: Zacchaeus stood and said he would give half his goods to the poor and restore fourfold all he had taken wrongly (Luke 19:8). That is repentance you can see, a turning that reaches all the way into a man's money and his victims. And Jesus declared, "This day is salvation come to this house... For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:9–10). The gospel does not merely forgive the outcast; it changes him from the inside out. No one is too corrupt, too compromised, or too far gone for Jesus to seek and to save.
For You
Two things press in here. First, the person you have quietly decided is beyond saving, the crooked one, the sellout, the one everyone despises, is exactly the sort Jesus walked up to and called. Do not write off anyone He died for. Pray for them, and be the kind of believer who would sit at their table.
Second, look at what true repentance did to Zacchaeus. It was not only a feeling; it went to his ledgers. It gave money back, made wrongs right, and cared for the poor. If God has met you, let His grace reach all the way into how you handle money, how you treat the people you have wronged, and what you do with what you have. Salvation that never touches the books has not gone very deep.
Carry It With You
Luke 19:10 KJV
"For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."
For the Historical Notes
Scripture is quoted from the KJV. The details of the Roman toll and tax system are drawn from standard scholarship on taxation in the early empire and the Gospels' own portrait of tax collectors. Reconstructed details of the collection system are flagged as such in the study.
More Life & Times studies are being added. Return to the map and pick your next passage.
Want to know what the Bible teaches about salvation?