Timeline

Full entries plotted by year, so you can see who lived alongside whom. Solid bars mark a reasonably firm estimated date; hatched, dashed bars mark a figure placed only by their broad era, because that period's chronology is genuinely disputed among evangelical scholars — see the note below.

Why do some bars look different? Most Old Testament dates — especially before the monarchy — are genuinely disputed among evangelical scholars themselves, not just uncertain the way an obscure detail might be. Competing chronological frameworks (for example, an early-date c. 1446 BC vs. a late-date c. 1250 BC Exodus) can shift a figure's placement by centuries. Rather than silently pick one framework and plot a precise year as if it were settled fact, figures from those disputed periods are shown as a hatched bar spanning their whole era instead — an estimate, not a date. Figures with firmer grounding (David's reign, dated from 1 Kings 6:1; New Testament figures, cross-referenced against Roman-era history) get a solid bar with a specific estimated year — each still marked "c." for circa, and each tooltip explains exactly what the date rests on.

The historical events shown for context are a small curated set of well-documented, independently-dated anchor points — not an exhaustive historical record.