The Three Bible Timelines: Why and How They Differ
February 25, 2013
Last updated on November 3rd, 2015 at 01:48 pm
The three most widely used Bible Timelines are:
-
Ussher’s Chronology: included in the margins of the Authorized King James Bible is based on the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Old Testament. The Masoretic text had an unbroken history of careful transcription for centuries.
-
Thiele: a modern Biblical chronologist whose work is accepted by secular Egyptologists as well as biblical scholars – often used by modern Evangelicals.
-
The Septuagint: on which the Catholic Bible is based, is the Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible translated between 300 BC and 1 BC.
Most people who try to compute a Bible timeline are faced with the same dilemmas. The Rvd. Professor James Barr, a Scottish Old Testament scholar, has identified three distinct periods that Ussher, and all biblical chronologists had to tackle:
-
Early times (Creation to Solomon). Anyone who starts out reading the Bible with Genesis, as many people do, can easily compute the years from Adam to Solomon.
-
Early Age of Kings (Solomon to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity). Now we have gaps in the record.
-
Late Age of Kings (Ezra and Nehemiah to the birth of Jesus). Here events are just mentioned with no possible way to link or calculate time frames. Historians use well known secular kings or events mentioned in the Bible (i.e., Nebuchadnezzar) to calculate the Bible dates.
