no one questions the historicity of say Pythagoras
Really?
Here’s a newspaper review whose author says Pythagoras “may well be a mythical amalgam of various forgotten sages”. The book under review itself says “Sadly, it is now almost universally assumed by classical scholars that Pythagoras never existed”. I suspect this is partly tongue in cheek, since the other information I can find doesn’t seem consistent with what it says on its face, but if it’s a joke I think it’s the sort that depends on not being too far from the truth. Here’s the History Channel suggesting Pythagoras may not have existed. Everything I can find about Pythagoras, scholarly or popular, emphasizes that our sources of information about him are late and untrustworthy and that scarcely anything is known about him.
It looks to me as if the usual belief is “probably real but essentially nothing is actually known about his life”, and a few people, mostly not actual scholars, say “actually, the evidence is so thin he may well not have been real”. Which is not so different from the situation with Jesus, except that most people who aren’t out-and-out mythicists about Jesus are willing to concede that some things are known about his life.
Really?
Here’s a newspaper review whose author says Pythagoras “may well be a mythical amalgam of various forgotten sages”. The book under review itself says “Sadly, it is now almost universally assumed by classical scholars that Pythagoras never existed”. I suspect this is partly tongue in cheek, since the other information I can find doesn’t seem consistent with what it says on its face, but if it’s a joke I think it’s the sort that depends on not being too far from the truth. Here’s the History Channel suggesting Pythagoras may not have existed. Everything I can find about Pythagoras, scholarly or popular, emphasizes that our sources of information about him are late and untrustworthy and that scarcely anything is known about him.
It looks to me as if the usual belief is “probably real but essentially nothing is actually known about his life”, and a few people, mostly not actual scholars, say “actually, the evidence is so thin he may well not have been real”. Which is not so different from the situation with Jesus, except that most people who aren’t out-and-out mythicists about Jesus are willing to concede that some things are known about his life.