Naminatha, the twenty first Tirthankara, is the last figure in the sequence before Neminatha, Parshvanatha, and finally Mahavira, meaning his traditional placement sits at the point in Jain cosmological chronology closest to, but still clearly preceding, the two figures, Parshvanatha and Mahavira, that most scholars treat as having some plausible claim to independently datable historical existence. This position makes Naminatha a useful marker for where the tradition's internal cosmological chronology gives way, over the final few Tirthankaras, to material scholars are willing to engage with as potentially historical rather than purely legendary, even though Naminatha himself remains, like the twenty figures preceding him, entirely within the legendary and cosmological register, described through the standard biographical template of auspicious dreams, renunciation, and liberation applied across the whole sequence rather than through any independently attested detail.
Jain tradition itself draws no such sharp line between Naminatha and his successors, treating the entire sequence of twenty four Tirthankaras as equally significant renewals of the same teaching across the ages, and the boundary between legendary and potentially historical figures is a modern scholarly distinction imposed on the material rather than a distinction the tradition marks internally.