a tax collector: a local man who bought the right to collect tolls and customs duties for the ruling power and made his living from whatever he could charge above his fixed quota
In the Gospels a tax collector was not a Roman government official, and not the wealthy company man that the old word "publican" suggests. He was a local businessman, or the hired agent of one, who had won at auction the right to collect indirect taxes: customs on goods in transit, market dues, tolls at a border crossing, or fees on the fishing trade. In Galilee that contract belonged to Herod Antipas rather than to Rome; in Judea it belonged to the Roman governor's apparatus. Levi sat at exactly such a booth in Capernaum, on a busy trade route at the edge of Antipas's territory.
The reason the job was hated lay in how it paid. The collector handed the authority a fixed sum in advance and then kept whatever he could squeeze above it, so the trade carried a built-in temptation to overcharge, and everyone assumed he gave in to it. That is the point behind John the Baptist's blunt instruction to tax collectors: collect no more than you are told to. Their bad name was first of all about money and dishonesty. Political resentment (they collected for the powers in charge) and, in later Jewish tradition, a sense of ritual defilement were layered on top, but the core objection was that they were assumed to be cheats.
Because of all this, "tax collector" became a byword for a disreputable outsider, routinely paired with "sinners" and even, in Matthew, with prostitutes as the very picture of money-driven sin. That is what makes the Gospels' use of the word so pointed. Jesus:
- was mocked as a friend of tax collectors and sinners
- called one of them to be an apostle
- held one up over a respectable Pharisee as the man who went home forgiven
- announced that such people were entering God's kingdom ahead of the religious leaders
The scandal only works because the label really was an insult.
Disputed
Why tax collectors were so despised in first-century Judaism, and therefore what stigma the word carries.
- majorityThe disrepute was primarily moral and economic: tax collectors were assumed to be dishonest and grasping, profiting by overcharging, and the "sinners" of the paired phrase are the openly wicked, not the ritually lax. Political resentment and any sense of ritual impurity were secondary.; Fritz Herrenbrück, Jesus und die Zöllner (WUNT 2/41; Mohr Siebeck, 1990), 285-288; E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (SCM, 1985), 174-211; John R. Donahue, 'Tax Collectors and Sinners', CBQ 33 (1971): 39-61
- minorityConcern over ritual impurity, from constant contact with Gentiles and their coinage, still colors the criticism of Jesus' meals with tax collectors, alongside the moral objection.; J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Eerdmans, 2003), 526-532; Craig Blomberg, Contagious Holiness: Jesus' Meals with Sinners (NSBT 19; IVP, 2005)