The word 'publican' is one of the most semantically fractured terms in English, carrying entirely different meanings in religious and social contexts while sharing a single word-form that has created centuries of unintended comic resonance. In biblical and theological contexts, a publican is a tax collector, typically despised as a collaborator with Roman imperial power and as a ritual sinner by virtue of his occupation. In British social contexts, a publican is the licensed keeper of a public house - a pub landlord. That the two uses are entirely unconnected in etymology (they derive from different Latin words) has not prevented the coincidence from generating ongoing amusement.
The KJV's choice of 'publican' to translate the Greek telones was based on the Latin publicanus - a Roman tax farmer who bid for the right to collect taxes in a province and made his profit from whatever he could collect above the required amount. The word was chosen to make the Roman fiscal context legible to English readers. But telones in the Gospels is more specifically a local toll collector at customs posts - likely a subordinate in the tax collection system rather than a major publicanus. The choice of 'publican' nonetheless gave the translation a Roman legal flavor that connected the text to its imperial context.
In the Gospel narratives, tax collectors (publicans) are a consistently significant group. Jesus calls Matthew (Levi) from his tax booth; he eats with tax collectors and sinners, provoking scandalized commentary; Zacchaeus the chief tax collector climbs a tree to see him and becomes a vehicle for the statement 'the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost' (Luke 19:10). Most memorably, the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18:10-14) contrasts the prayer of a self-congratulating Pharisee with the prayer of a tax collector who stands far off, beats his breast, and says 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' Jesus declares that the publican 'went down to his house justified rather than the other.'
This parable gave Christian theology a model of contrite prayer that has been referenced continuously for two millennia. The publican's prayer - sometimes called the Jesus Prayer in Eastern Christian tradition (elaborated as 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner') - became foundational to Orthodox spirituality and appears widely in Christian devotional literature. The contrast between the ostentatious religious prayer and the simple, honest confession of unworthiness is one of the clearest expressions in the Gospels of the principle that God receives the humble and resists the proud.
In British English, 'publican' as a pub landlord derives from the Latin publicus (public) via 'public house.' The two 'publicans' meet only in the dictionary. Yet the coincidence has been noted and exploited by writers, preachers, and comedians for centuries: the biblical publican who was a sinner and the English publican who sells alcohol occupy adjacent moral territory in certain ecclesiastical minds, and the overlap has been pointed out with varying degrees of seriousness.
The word's biblical use is largely archaic in modern translations, which prefer 'tax collector' for clarity. 'Publican' survives primarily in liturgical contexts, in quotations from the KJV, and in the compound 'publican and sinner' - which has entered English as a description of those outside respectable religious society.