A Teaching and a Contested Martyrdom for Shimon ben Gamliel I

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Shimon ben Gamliel I is remembered in Pirkei Avot 1:17 for the teaching that study is not the essential thing but action, and that whoever multiplies words brings about sin, a saying distinct from the better known teaching at 1:18, attributed to his own grandson, the later Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel II, a distinction the Mishnah's own arrangement of the two adjacent sayings makes easy to conflate without close reading.

Later rabbinic tradition counts him among the sages executed by Rome, but that legendary list of martyred sages is most often set two generations later, under the emperor Hadrian following the Bar Kokhba Revolt, rather than at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE where Josephus's own account places his death. This atlas records both the martyrdom tradition and the chronological tension scholars have long noted between it and the contemporary historical record, rather than resolving the two into a single settled account.