> That's why everyone alive in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus would have been able to claim David for an ancestor. This really threw me for a while, as it

> That's why everyone alive in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus would have been able to claim David for an ancestor. This really threw me for a while, as it seemed to be an obviously false statement. Until I realized the author had switched contexts on me: Jesus claimed male ancestry, but this statement is including ancestry from both male and female lines. So it seems overall believable, however I still see many provably false assumptions in this article. * The population of the Holy Land was a constant 1 million people for 35 generations. Assumes no population growth. (false) * No imigrants (false, see next bullet) * No intermarrying with other cultures (false, because this intermarriage is often cited in the Bible as a reason people turned to other gods) > More specifically, imagine the simplest case of a population of a constant size - say a million (the approximate size of the Holy Land at the time of Jesus). I'm just quoting this to show that the author asks us to assume a constant size population I'm certain that there were thousands of people in Palestine that could have claimed an unbroken ancestry from David. But based on all the flaws in this article, I don't trust the assertion that everyone in the area can claim an unbroken line (even including female ancestors).