Yup it is Cnidus actually.my iPad autocorrect is a bit wonky.
You’re debating how much historical influence small events have. But that’s not what was at issue with the “would Jesus have been born” question. What’s at issue there is how much influence small events have on other small events.
Think of a balloon and the gas within it. If I nudge a few molecules in one area of the balloon, it is exceedingly unlikely that this will have any effect on the pattern of air pressure within the balloon. But it is far far more likely that this will have a “huge” (so to speak) effect on the subsequent positions of all the various molecules within the balloon. Statistically, things will be just as they would have been had I not nudged the molecules. But on the scale of individual molecules, things will look very very different.
So with the whole Persia thing. It’s not implausible that history would have looked almost exactly the same. (It’s debateable, but not implausible, and not what’s at issue in the “birth of Jesus” question.) But even if history would have looked almost exactly the same, the individuals living that history would have looked very different. Different people would have been born in Greece than would have been born otherwise, and so different people would have migrated out (and in) to greece, and different people would have been born in places outside of greece, and so on, til the change has propagated throughout the world.
So I think it’s very plausible that Jesus woudln’t have been born–and if he had, he very likely wouldn’t have known a lot of the same people he actually did know, and may not as an individual have done almost any of the things he actually did. Of course the sociological factors may have been just right for some kind of major world religion to be born around that time and place nonetheless–but it could well have grown up around some figure other than Jesus.
I was reading your argument as something different. If it is simply that the names change, then I don’t really have a problem with it. I think you are probably vastly overestimating the effect of macro changes on the trivia of daily life, and that in fact most of “history” has zero effect on most people, and in fact meetings and lineages likely remain quite stable despite tinkering around the edges with battles or dynasties, other than for the actual people who lie or die in the battle, or on the throne.
But I can’t prove it, nor, of course, can you.
Although, of course, some Christ or other would have been born, since that’s just the title that gets bestowed on the Messianic office holder.
This is all demonstrated by the fact that before the battle result at Athens changed the first time, the son of God was actually Ned from Nazareth.
I know! Must be getting old.
Why not? 
To expand on that question, Dubya’s ancestors on both sides, and Obama’s on his mom’s side, go back in this country at least to the 18th century, and Obama’s dad was not related to Sally Hemmings. Why would a lack of Jefferson cause them to not exist?
If the question is on the order of keeping everything the same but having Jefferson die prenatally or something, my guess would be that Obama and W have a significant chance of not existing. Its hard to give a serious estimate. I have no idea if the chance is more or less than 50%. But it’s not zero, and it’s not just barely possible–it’s more than barely possible IMO.
Why should this be? So say there’s no Jefferson. So some other dude (or no one) fills his “place” in history. Which means if there’s a Declaration of Independence (there might not even be one) then it is worded differently. Now kids for generations thence memorize the document (or don’t if there’s not one). Anyway they memorize the first paragraph. And a teacher on one occasion sends her students to different sides of the room depending on how well they do. And in our world, one pair of kids that found themselves next to each other was an ancestor of Dubya. Meanwhile in the alternate universe, because the document is different (or doesn’t exist) the pair don’t find themselves together at that time and that place. So they never have sex, or they have sex at a slightly different time. And so W’s ancestor is never born. So W is never born.
Who knows if that particular story is how things would play out. But it’s just one story. In truth there are gajillions of stories the details of which
A. Depend on the existence and nature of Jefferson’s life history, and
B. Have an effect on exactly which people are born.
Remember, all it would take for you not to exist is for your parents to have sex a minute earlire or later than they did. If Jefferson not existing might have had even that much of an effect on your parents, then you probably would not have been born.
I forget the exact numbers here, but it’s been shown that everyone alive today is descended from everyone alive from (something like) just as few as 2000 years ago. Like as in, literally everyone alive today is descended from Julius Caesar or something to that effect. ETA: Or well no, that’s not it–not literally everyone. But like, all Europeans or something like that.
Given that fact (whatever exactly it is–I know I’ve been vague here 
it is more than plausible that a different battle outcome at Athens would have led to a completely altered population in the present day.
Oo! Oo! Cecil did a column on it.
You just have to go back to 1200AD for everyone of European ancestry today to be descended from 80% of the European population back then. So a single altered death in 1200AD in Europe is very likely to significantly change a large number of individual births and deaths today.
And remember, the effect is larger than even this suggests, since what it takes to make a person not-born instead of born isn’t just that his parents fail to meet, but that they fail to have sex at exactly the specific moment they had sex. So even if substantially the same people tended to meet and have sex after the chronological anomaly in 1200, very different people would be born of their unions, and this effect would rapidly spread.
Would this affect history? That’s debatable. But it’s not debatable, as far as I can see, whether it would have a major effect on just which exact individuals would actually be around to witness that history.
Ha, I hadn’t noticed the similarity. 
Um; the fact that small differences can build up into large ones is a long-proven principle. Your position amounts to the idea that there’s some kind of “force of destiny” that will force everything down to the tiniest detail to occur regardless of any attempt to change them. You’re basically saying that people’s DNA will spontaneously reassemble itself to match the people killed in lost battles that were won in ours.
If we’re going to assume that history is so rigid that hundreds of years later people with the same genetics and same names are doing and saying the same things, then the answer to the OP is “nothing changes”. People robotically act as if Athens had won, they write the history books as if it had won and it has no effect on history at all past a generation or two as the Magic Power of History erases all change from the timeline.
I find this concept’s lack of falsifiability disturbing.
As is the fact that local variance is swallowed by sufficient sample size. The argument here isn’t the existence of this or that principle but their applicability.
No, I am saying that the fine granularity of history can vary without affecting the gross direction of history.
You aren’t arguing against magic, you’re arguing against the Central Limit Theorem.
If the “Many Worlds” hypothesis is true, all we need is an inter-universal transport.
It should be shaped like a police box.
But if they had control of the Greeks as well as the Phoenicians, they would be a maritime power.
That’s not how things like weather systems and other chaotic systems work. We know this.
Nonsense. I’m arguing against the idea that there’s going to be a guy named Jesus, with the same genetics as real-world Jesus, pushing the same religion Jesus made up. That’s “fine granularity”, not “gross direction”. That’s something that would take what amounts to magic to explain.
A more interesting question would be, in a world where Persia conquered Greece, would the conditions still apply, that in our timeline five centuries later made Judea messiah-ready?
Persia conquers Greece. Then what? I doubt they can hold on to Greece longer than a few years. We still see Persia collapse and the rise of the Hellenistic era and Rome. So yes, Judea is Messiah ready.
One thing that might gum it up a little is if the Persians learn enough from the Greek occupation that it significantly affects the way they do business, and hence their longevity. It’s possible; the Romans did. Captives can capture their captors.
As far as Messiahs go, you still probably wind up having local tub-thumping mystery cults with some highbrow Hellenistic cultural seasoning. If anything, that may happen dramatically earlier. Does it still catch on without the local resentment of imperial Roman rule? Does it even matter in the long run without the eventual Roman imperial co-optation? (Maybe a Neoplatonic intellectual tradition that germinates in the east rather than the west actually makes it far stronger…)
That’s wonderful, but AFAIK nobody has been arguing with that. I certainly have not. I’ve been arguing that perturbations flatten unless they’re reinforced by systemic changes. Which is (I’d have thought) pretty obvious.
People in this thread have definitely been arguing that mostly the same individuals would still be alive today if Athens had lost at Marathon, or similar claims. Some people were arguing theres no reason to think Jesus wouldn’t have been born. Some other argued that if Jefferson hadn’t been born, we’d still definitely have W and Obama alive (and president) in contemporary times. These are the claims Der Trihs was arguing against.
Observe post number 7, which started things off. It’s all about the question of whether a particular individual would have been born or not.
Again, observe this statement from Der Trihs:
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From an early post. Read carefully, you can see he’s been completely misunderstood. He’s not saying small changes balloon into large historical changes. He’s saying small changes balloon into a whole bunch of other small changes. “Tiny details like individual humans.”