Persia, or Britain, and the Saw

The traditions of Simon's mission and death are unusually scattered and mutually contradictory, a sign of how little was actually known. The most widespread account pairs him with Jude Thaddaeus and sends the two to preach in Persia or Mesopotamia, where both are martyred, the version behind their shared feast day in the Western calendar.

Other traditions send him elsewhere entirely. One strand has him evangelize Egypt and North Africa; a late and much-repeated legend, without early support, brings him all the way to Britain. The Eastern churches preserve their own local variants. No two agree, and none can be traced to a reliable early source.

The manner of his death is equally unfixed. Western iconography most often gives him a saw, from a tradition that he was sawn in two, and he is accordingly patron of sawyers and woodcutters; other accounts have him crucified or killed with an axe or sword. The saw became his standard attribute in art, allowing him to be recognized in a way the texts never allowed him to be known. Of all the twelve, Simon the Zealot is perhaps the one about whom the tradition preserved the least and invented the most.