Er, saying the birth date of Jesus is off by a few years isn’t the same as saying he didn’t exist at all.

Our AD system of years was devised in the 6th century by a dude Dionysius Exiguus who probably wanted to replace an existing dating system based on the reign of Diocletian, the Era of Martyrs.

But no one really knows how Dionysius worked it out exactly, or if he even actually used the birth date and not some other shit like nativity. The bible itself doesn’t give exact dates, people commonly dated it by a passage saying he was about 30 during the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, so you have to work out how long ago Tiberius’ reign was and then go from there, but it also doesn’t say he was exactly 30…

Then there’s other shit like how the diocletian era system had a different start date and some confusion over exact ruling lengths of emperors which would mess up counting back through the years.

So this, coupled with scholars trying to figure out dates of things in the bible based on trying to date events mentioned like the census has led to biblical scholars dating the birth to like 4 or 5 BC and that the dude who was trying to figure that out 600 years after the event got it a bit wrong.

It’s wiki so not the greatest source, but this article goes over most the issues about trying to date the birth

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus

And another about trying to date other events:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Jesus

Dating ancient events can be tricky when people were using different dating systems based on shit like when roman consuls or emperors reigned, or when the Olympics happened, or from years since the biblical creation (anno mundi, still used in the Hebrew calendar for religious purposes).

Adoption of the AD system of counting years by most of Europe by the 10th century has made dating since then a lot easier. But even then you have some annoyances like the adoption of the Gregorian calendar which not everyone did at the same time or in the same way leading to differences of up to 2 weeks between the different systems: like how the Russian February Revolution of 1917 actually took place in March because the Russians refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar until after they overthrew the tsar, and a bunch of Orthodox Christians still use the Julian calendar for the dates of religious holidays like Christmas.

So to end this long rambling diatribe: dating old shit ain’t an exact science and dates of ancient events can be a bit blurry.

That’s the proper name of it. The Ukraine isn’t the proper name of Ukraine.

Never because that’s not how trademarks work.

The amount of people in general that don’t understand even the most basic shit about trademarks or how they differ from copyright and often mix up the two is staggering really.

That fps he and Adrian Carmack failed to Kickstart?

You’re surprised that most people use the free option that requires less hassle to get going?

Fuck reddit

TPB has been a cesspit for years now.

Well I got most of that from reading the Askhistorians subreddit over the years. Dunno if you know about it but it’s a heavily moderated board where the answers have to be in depth and represent recent academical standards. Tons of good shit there. I hope they migrate over to lemmy or kbin soon, I don’t really feel like searching for posts that cover the library there but you should be able to find them easily.

Oh right, lol. Sorry for the big post then. I’m autistic and some things go completely over my head. I’m also prone to rambling on a lot as you might have noticed.

The burning of the library of alexandria causing a loss of a ton of knowledge is basically just a modern meme. Well it has been a bit of a myth for a few centuries but Carl Sagan popularised it in Cosmos and he was quite wrong

There were a ton of libraries all around the classical world, basically every town had one. Alexandria was one of the biggest and most prestigious but you had other huge libraries as well such as the Library of Pergamon which rivalled Alexandria. Also book/scroll collecting was quite popular amongst the upper classes so there would’ve been tons of personal libraries around. Granted they weren’t on the scale of alexandria but when you have libraries in every town, personal collections and then some big libraries that matched Alexandria, not much at all would’ve been unique to just alexandria so there wasn’t much knowledge lost at all, if any.

Plus there’s the fact that there wasn’t even a single ‘burning of alexandria’, there were multiple events over it’s history. There was the big fire with Caesar and it’s agreed a ton of stuff was burnt but they restocked with copies from other libraries and carried on. There’s records of it still in operation in the 3rd century. But before all that the library had been in decline for at least a hundred years anyway as the later Ptolemies didn’t bother providing adequate funding and the library was mismanaged for quite a while with the position of head librarian becoming quite politicised.

What caused the loss of a ton of classical works is the fact that papyrus is pretty shit for preservation as outside of the most dry and arid places it’ll just rot away to after 50-100 years in most conditions.

What classical writings we do have that survives is mostly the result of whatever shit people in medieval times thought was worth copying and recopying over the centuries, recovering palimpsests and the rare actual preserved papyrus finds such as the library of scrolls preserved in Herculaneum. And what we’ve lost is down to two millennia of entropy rather than caesar or Christians burning down a library.