Fishers of Men
18 Walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers: Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. 19 He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers for men.” 20 They immediately left their nets and followed him. 21 Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. He called them. 22 They immediately left the boat and their father, and followed him.
Told in almost the same words as the earliest account; what is Matthew's own is one name given early and one detail left out.
He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers for men.”
The call of the four runs so closely to the earliest telling Mark 1:16–20 that the differences are a matter of a phrase. Two of them are worth naming.
The first is that Matthew introduces the fisherman as Simon, who is called Peter Matthew 4:18 at the moment of the call, long before the scene at Caesarea Philippi where the name is given and explained Matthew 16:18. The reader is told from the outset what he will become, which is this Gospel's habit — the same instinct that names the child Immanuel in chapter one and lets the last verse of the book answer it.
The second is a subtraction. The earlier account mentions that Zebedee was left in the boat with the hired servants, and Matthew says only that they left the boat and their father Matthew 4:22. The detail about the hired men softens the departure — the family business was not left short-handed. Without it, what stands is the cost: a boat, a father, and an immediate going.
They immediately left their nets and followed him.
What both tellings share is the pace, and it is the point of the passage. A word, and a trade abandoned mid-cast.
settled What this mark means