There would have been hundreds if not thousands of people who could claim descent from David and Solomon in Jesus’ time.  This hardly meant that they all had a rightful claim to the throne or that anyone would have taken such a claim seriously.  By this logic, Joseph would have had the same claim as Jesus, as would Joseph’s father and his grandfather and so on, and as a result the lives of these men would also have been recorded by thousands of followers across the land.  But they weren’t.  Being a descendant of David and Solomon (or claiming such descent, to be more accurate) just didn’t mean what Brown implies it did.