Podcast: Jesus’s Birthday, the Exodus, and Other Bible Timeline Questions (Andrew Steinmann)

September 30, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Importance of Biblical Chronology

In this episode, Andrew Steinmann discusses the timeline of the Bible, when key events actually happened, what else was going on at that same time, and why it all matters for our understanding of the Bible's message for us today.

ESV Chronological Bible

ESV Chronological Bible

The ESV Chronological Bible guides readers through 8 eras of Scripture in the order the events occurred. Divided into 365 daily readings, this Bible makes it easy to read over the course of a year.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:00 - What Is Biblical Chronology?

Matt Tully
Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast.

Andrew Steinmann
It’s good to be here with you.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about biblical chronology—understanding the timeline of the Bible and the biblical story. Maybe to start us off, as one of your interests and one of your areas of study as an academic, what was it that first drew you to this area of study?

Andrew Steinmann
From an early age, I was taught all these Bible stories, and it was emphasized at church that this happened at a certain time, but it wasn’t always clear what time things happened. What day was it that Jesus walked out of the grave? When was it that Abraham left for Canaan? And these were questions that were always in the back of my mind. When I got to seminary and later on into graduate school, I was exposed to people who had done research in this area. It became almost a hobby of mine outside of my other academic work until about 2004 or 2005, when I really sat down to work this all out on my own. Since that time, I’ve published a book and subsequent papers on various aspects of Biblical chronology, mainly because I want Christians to be confident that we have a God who works in history. Our God is not some other gods of some other religion where it doesn’t really matter if they did something in time. But we believe in the God who created time and space, and the Scriptures make it clear that he acted in certain times and in certain places for the benefit of his people. And I think that’s important for us to hold to so that we don’t get into the world’s mode of viewing Christianity as almost mythic.

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful because I think even for conservative Bible-believing Christians who would affirm Scripture is true and these are true events, we can, though, sometimes be pretty fuzzy on when these things might’ve happened, how they even related to each other in the history of the world. How would you briefly define biblical chronology?

Andrew Steinmann
It’s the discipline of understanding how things happened in time in relationship to each other. So there are various dating schemes, both in antiquity and in modern times. And biblical chronology has to be able to use not only the data we draw from the Bible but also from extra biblical sources. So the Bible references people other than the people of Israel as doing things. And so we read about a king like Sennacherib and what he did. Well, that means sound biblical chronology places that even at the right time when Sennacherib was on the throne of Assyria.

Matt Tully
Which entails an understanding of archaeology and other ancient texts that aren’t Scripture.

Andrew Steinmann
Right. Archeology, certainly, and ancient secondary sources, ancient history writers. Now, we don’t really get any real history writing until Herodotus, the Greek author, writes his history of the Persian empire, but we do have inscriptions from the ancient world that have survived. People put up monuments to their achievements. Every king has to claim he had a victory, whether he even had one or not.

Matt Tully
That’s a truism that’s true today.

Andrew Steinmann
These things are often given by dates, sometimes down to the month or rarely to the day, but sometimes down to the month. Other times, just generally to the year, but all those things can be used to help us arrange the Bible in a chronological manner, because the Bible is not always written in a chronological way, nor do we arrange the books necessarily chronologically. We’re used to thinking maybe Genesis through Kings and Chronicles is roughly in chronological order, but the prophets are not arranged in chronological order. Paul’s letters are not arranged in chronological order.

Matt Tully
Anyone who’s read the Bible straight through would probably have gotten a sense for that at some point. This isn’t quite in the linear order that I might’ve assumed. And I want to get into why that might be that our Bibles aren’t in chronological order by default, so to speak, and then what the value of that could be. In your experience, what do Christians typically get wrong when it comes to thinking about the timeline of the Bible?

Andrew Steinmann
In general, I think they probably get wrong the distance between the Old Testament and the New Testament. So depending on where exactly you believe the last book of the Old Testament was written and when you believe the first book was written (or maybe if you want to start with the birth of Jesus), you have roughly 400 to 450 years. And I think a lot of times Christians are fuzzy about that 400 and 450 years. Now, we have other sources outside the canonical sixty-six books of the Bible that fill in some of that detail, but one thing I find is they don’t get the idea of the distance there is between Malachi and Jesus. And that’s quite a distance when you’re talking four or four and a half centuries.

Matt Tully
Any other misconceptions or assumptions that people tend to have about the timeline of Scripture that you’ve found?

Andrew Steinmann
Oftentimes people assume, even when they’re reading the historical books, that everything is in chronological order. That’s not true in 2 Samuel. That’s not always true in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew is roughly in chronological order, but when you compare him to Mark and Luke, you will begin to see that Matthew sometimes puts things out of chronological order because he wants to arrange certain things topically or theologically. So I think a common misconception is, “Well, I can just read through the book of 1 Samuel and into 2 Samuel, and I’m reading about the reign of David, and everything in the reign of David is in chronological order.” And that’s not true.

07:33 - Is Scripture a Reliable Historical Record?

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that because that’s something that many people have observed and noticed, and it’s even something that skeptics will often point to, especially in the Gospels, as evidence that Scripture isn’t a reliable historical record. Why would Matthew record these events of Jesus’s life mostly in chronological order but then change a few things? What was the purpose of that?

Andrew Steinmann
Well, his purpose oftentimes is to group together similar topics. What he’s often trying to do is give a continuity of thought rather than a continuity of time. Unlike Luke who makes a statement at the beginning of his gospel that things are arranged in basically chronological order. He doesn’t use that term, but that’s basically what Luke says to Theophilus when he begins to write his Gospel. So Matthew’s not so much concerned with you knowing the sequence of events in Jesus’s ministry. He roughly does that, but he’s more concerned with you understanding Jesus’s teaching by grouping things together that he believes explicate one another, and so he puts them right next to each other.

Matt Tully
And I think some Bible scholars would point to that as an example of how the ancient conception of history might not perfectly line up with how we would want to do history in the modern world. Would you agree with that? Is there something to that as well?

Andrew Steinmann
There is. Again, we have to consider that the tradition of formal writing of history probably goes back to the Greek author Herodotus, who’s often called the father of history. Ironically, sometimes he’s called the father of lies, too, because he got a lot of his history from oral history. And a lot of what he says people take with a large grain of salt. But he’s really the first person who tries to go back and investigate what we would call secular history and write it out. And he does this for the Persian empire. The Greeks had a great interest in the Persian empire because they had conflicts with the Persians. And so history is being written about 300 years before Jesus. Before that you have no real secular histories written. You have what we might call the holy histories in the Scriptures, but you have no secular history written before that time. And so even by Matthew’s day, there’s not an extremely ancient tradition of writing history. So they often have a different way of looking at history and how to write it and how to do it because considering the long history we now have of historiography of writing history, it was fairly much in its infancy or toddlerhood when Matthew is writing or mark is writing or any of the other of the New Testament are being written.

Matt Tully
I’m just struck that we can so often bring our own cultural assumptions and conceptions of things, like history. We can have a journalistic view of history where every specific date matters. Like you said, in the ancient world, the day was hardly ever, if ever, really referenced. But for us today, the thought of a news article talking about some event and not giving us the exact day would just not make a lot of sense to us. I think some of this is just getting into a different paradigm than what we might be used to.

Andrew Steinmann
Yeah. And you see this in the Bible. In the late biblical books, some of the prophets will date their prophecies to a specific day or a specific month. But in the earlier prophets, sometimes they don’t give any date at all. And sometimes if they do give a date, it’s just the such and such year of such and such king.

11:29 - Why Should I Care About Biblical Chronology?

Matt Tully
So let’s take a big step back for a minute. Speaking to the normal Christian listening who finds this interesting but is asking, “How does understanding the timeline of the Scriptures actually helped me in my own normal, everyday Bible reading? Why is this more than just sort of an intellectual curiosity?”

Andrew Steinmann
I think it helps you locate people and events in relationship to one another so that you don’t think Isaiah is around when David is on the throne. You understand that no, Isaiah is more in the time of Hezekiah. Or you don’t think that the Herod that Jesus is interacting with when he’s in his ministry is the same Herod who was around when Jesus was born.

Matt Tully
Who tried to kill him as a baby.

Andrew Steinmann
Right. Yes. So it’s important to locate these things in relationship to one another so that we’re not confused about what we’re talking about. For the more intellectually minded skeptic of the Bible, I think this is an important apologetic to be able to say, “No, we can date these things to a time. We can tell who was interacting with whom. We can show you that this is reliable history writing, even if it’s not the type of history writing we would do today.”

Matt Tully
As you go to look at Scripture and then try to assign a date to every passage of Scripture, are there times when you get to a passage and there’s just no way to figure out when this was written and when this was intended to be understood?

Andrew Steinmann
Yeah, a lot of the psalms are that way. We can give maybe a general, fuzzy date for a lot of psalms. Unless the Psalm has a superscription that says “David wrote this when” or something like that, many of the psalms we can only guesstimate, and that’s about the best we can do. There are a couple prophets that are notoriously difficult to date. Obadiah. I think there are twelve different men named Obadiah in the Old Testament.

Matt Tully
Oh, wow.

Andrew Steinmann
And we don’t know which of those Obadiahs was the prophet. Or maybe he’s a thirteenth. He’s notoriously difficult to date. We can give some parameters. He has to be after a certain date but before another date, but you’re really talking a span of a century or more. That’s one example that, historically, it’s very difficult to date.

Matt Tully
I’m just thinking of what it looks like for someone like you to start to unravel Scripture, the storyline of Scripture, and start to place all these different events and people on a timeline. What did that process look like for you to actually do the work and keep things organized?

Andrew Steinmann
It looked a lot like a spreadsheet. I did a lot of work with spreadsheets, where I’d have one line per year so I could organize things. And it took a lot of charting. Sometimes I had to draw charts for myself to keep it all together, with a lot of notations about various biblical passages and sometimes extra biblical sources. It’s just a matter of being very nerdy about it, which I am.

Matt Tully
For those spreadsheet geeks out there, that probably sounds like a pretty fun project to get to work on.

Andrew Steinmann
Yes.

Matt Tully
In the overarching timeline that you incorporate into this Bible that you’ve been working on for Crossway, the ESV Chronological Bible, you don’t start including specific dates until the birth of Abram, which you date at 2166 BC, I believe. So everything before Abram’s birth—Noah and the flood, the Tower of Babel, and even the creation of Adam and Eve—you leave those as part of primeval history but don’t actually give them any specific dates. Why do that?

Andrew Steinmann
The dating of things before Abraham is notoriously controverted. Are the genealogies always father to son, or do they skip generations? To the English reader, it kind of looks like you’re just going father to son. But reading it in Hebrew, there raises a number of questions that are difficult to answer. And I’ve been part of that conversation recently. I’ve published several papers on this. It is notoriously difficult to just add up the ages that you get in the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 and determine a date for the flood or a date for creation or the date for the birth of one of the people that are mentioned there. And so rather than come down on a particular scheme, I thought it was more fair to readers just to say all of this stuff is before the flood and before Abraham, and let the reader sort that out. It’s very clear that the Bible is treating those things as historical. What is not so clear is whether you can just add up the ages and come up with an age. And besides that, in the major traditions of the biblical text—the Masoretic text, the traditional Hebrew text, the Septuagint, the traditional Greek text, and the Samaritan Pentateuch (the version of the five books of the Bible of Moses that were used amongst Samaritans)—have different numbers there. And so you have to sort through that too. So rather than try to explain all that to readers, I thought it was probably much better to just say all this happened before Abraham.

Matt Tully
I want to come back to the issue of genealogies because I think that’s a really interesting thing that oftentimes Christians have questions about. But before we go to that, how do we know Abraham’s date, 2166 BC? Give us a sense of how we get to that concrete, specific date.

Andrew Steinmann
Ironically, we have to go all the way to Solomon to start out. Now, the book of Kings tells us that Solomon began to build the temple in the fourth year of his reign 480 years after the exodus. It’s the 480th year of the exodus era. So we know we can reliably date Solomon’s reign.

Matt Tully
How do we do that? Through archaeological evidence?

Andrew Steinmann
Archaeological evidence, interactions between the kings of Israel and the pharaohs of Egypt or other people in the ancient Near East. Through that we can reliably date Solomon. So we’ve got his date. We can count back 480 years. We can get the exodus. Very commonly I accept the date of 1446 BC for the exodus. And then you can start using data from the Bible. The Bible tells us how old Abraham was. We know how old he was when Isaac was born. We know how old Isaac was when Jacob was born. We have plenty of chronological indicators about the birth of Jacob’s sons. We know they were in Egypt for 430 years to the day, according to the book of Exodus. It’s easy, therefore, to count back.

Matt Tully
To start mapping it back one stone at a time, getting back to Abraham.

Andrew Steinmann
Yeah.

18:48 - Genealogies and the Oldest Man Who Ever Lived

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about those genealogies. I think sometimes we see those and apart from the interpretive side, we just don’t know what to do with these. We don’t know why they’re in our Bibles sometimes. We also can wonder, as you said, whether or not these are meant to be a complete history of these people’s genealogical lines where we could count them up. And I think one of the big questions that comes up, too, is just the age of some of these people. We read that Methuselah, the oldest man who ever lived (according to what we can see in Scripture), lived 969 years. Should we take that literally? Was he actually almost 1,000 years old when he died?

Andrew Steinmann
I believe the numbers there are reliable and that they do tell us that Methuselah lived a very long life. It’s interesting because people often ask me, “Why did people before the flood live so long?” My answer is that I don’t know that everybody before the flood lived so long. I only know about ten particular men in the line from Adam to Noah. Maybe they were living longer than their contemporaries because God blessed them. I believe the main purpose of that genealogy and the one after the flood that leads to Abraham is not so much chronological as it is Messianic. It’s telling us that God made a promise to Adam and Eve to bring for someone to crush Satan’s head. And he knows that promise and we see how that promise follows down the generations until we get to Abraham, who once again gets the promise that the Messiah would come from his line. So I think the primary thing there is it’s about Jesus. And so we get these long ages, and I think the long ages there are probably God’s blessing on these men because he chose them to be in this line that eventually will lead to the world’s Savior. And whether everybody in that era was living that long, I don’t know. I suspect, from what Genesis 5 says about those before the flood, that in general people were living longer, but I suspect that Methuselah and Lamech and some of these other people who are mentioned there probably even lived longer than their contemporaries. We have some precedent for this even after the flood. Moses lives 120 years. Joseph lives a very long life. Isaac lives a very long life. Abraham also lives a very long life. And I think it’s all because of the blessing of God, either because they’re in the Messianic line, or somebody like Joseph because of what he did to preserve the Messianic line by bringing his family to Egypt and providing for them.

21:26 - Can We Know the Exact Year of Creation?

Matt Tully
Another big question that inevitably comes up when we talk about the timeline of the Bible is trying to understand when creation happened. As I was preparing for this interview, I was looking around on the internet at different prominent Christian websites where they talk about some of these things. One of them was pretty committed to clearly defining that creation happened in 4,004 BC. What do you make of that particular date and even that effort to try to assign a specific year to creation?

Andrew Steinmann
As I said earlier, I think there are many questions surrounding these genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11, and I’m a skeptic of whether you can just add up the dates and come up with a date. I do believe that the people lived as long as they did. I’m not challenging that. But whether it’s listing every generation is, in my mind, an open question. So I wouldn’t commit myself to a date of 4,000 BC or 6,000 years ago or something like that. You can’t use that to go back millions and billions of years, as modern neo-Darwinians would have us do. I think many evangelicals and good Bible-believing Christians would say 10,000, maybe as much as 20,000 years ago, creation happened. And I wouldn’t want to argue with them. They’re not trying to justify evolutionary theory by doing that. They’re just noting that genealogies in the ancient world were done differently. And you don’t have to just talk about the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies to note that. Ezra’s genealogy, which is probably the longest single genealogy in the Old Testament, skips over several generations. Ezra’s descended from a line of high priests, and we know those high priests from elsewhere in the Scripture, and some of them are just left out. They skip from great grandfather to great grandson in some cases. And anybody who’s read the Gospel of Matthew knows that Matthew identifies three eras in Jesus’s genealogy, fourteen generations in each. But if you compare it to the Old Testament, you’ll find out he skipped some generations to get there. Now, we’re just not used to that. When we do genealogy, and I’ve done a lot of work on my own genealogy, we never skip a generation. We want to know. But their purpose in genealogy is not exactly the same as our purpose in genealogy.

Matt Tully
They’re much more interested in the theological significance than letting you count up the years.

Andrew Steinmann
Yes, that’s correct. So I think we have to be careful when using genealogies to date things because unless there’s a clear indication that they’re always going father to son, we have to assume that they may at times skip a generation here or there. And they may skip over as many as three or four generations at once.

24:32 - Dangers to Avoid in Biblical Chronology

Matt Tully
I wonder if you could speak to some of the pitfalls or the dangers of studying biblical chronology and wanting to understand that and wanting to let that inform how we interpret and read Scripture. Are there any dangers that Christians should be careful to avoid?

Andrew Steinmann
The first danger is overlaying our view of time and the reckoning of time on the ancients. We have this calendar, we have years, BC, years, AD—something that was established a long time ago and we’re still following. But they didn’t have calendars like that. Oftentimes they just counted the years of the king’s reign.

Matt Tully
Of the current king’s reign.

Andrew Steinmann
Of the current king’s reign. So you had to know the sequence of kings and how many years they reigned to get a longer chronology. They used different calendars. We have a calendar that begins in January every year in what we would think of as the dead of winter, unless you live in the Southern hemisphere and then you think of it as in the middle of summer. But they didn’t have calendars that way. The ancient sacred calendar in Israel began with the first month of spring. The ancient Regno calendar for the Kings of Judah began in the fall, six months offset from that. The current calendar we have dates only back to Pope Gregory the Great, the Gregorian calendar. It was a reformation of the Julian calendar put in effect by Julius Caesar. Even in the Roman empire, you had competing calendars. You had an Egyptian calendar that was also standardized by Julius Caesar. And before that it was different in Egypt. So our conception of time and how the calendar works and how hours work and so forth, many times Christians sometimes read the Bible and they just assume they know what the calendar is, what the days are. And it’s not that way. It’s even that different in different places at the same time sometimes in antiquity. So you can’t make assumptions like that. One of the assumptions that I commonly run across is relating to the chronology of Jesus’s Passion Week. Was he really crucified on a Friday? Because it says it was the day of the preparation for the Sabbath. Well, that’s a technical term in the first century among Jews. The day of preparation was a technical term that meant Friday, or technically Thursday night until Friday night.

Matt Tully
Yeah. It covers a little bit of Thursday.

Andrew Steinmann
A little bit of Thursday. From sundown Thursday until sundown Friday. And then the Sabbath began on sundown Friday. So the day of preparation was the day you prepared everything because you couldn’t work on the Sabbath. So you have to understand that term as they used it there. Another thing is the way they use the term Passover in the first century. Jews in the first century would use Passover to mean the specific day of Passover. But Passover is followed by seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And sometimes they use Passover to encompass all eight days. So depending on where you’re reading in the Gospels, you have to be careful. Are they talking about the actual day of Passover or are they talking about the eight day period of Passover plus the feast of unleavened bread? So those are the kinds of things that I think are simple mistakes that Christians can make because they’re not aware that the Gospel writers are using terms specific to their era.

28:13 - Can We Know the Exact Date of Jesus’s Birth?

Matt Tully
That’s right. That’s where a good study Bible can help you understand not just an English understanding of the word on face value but the contextual meaning of those words. Maybe a few more miscellaneous questions for you. I know one of the things that is often debated and discussed is the actual date of Christmas. What’s your best take on when Christmas actually happened?

Andrew Steinmann
Well, Jesus has to be born before Herod the Great dies. Herod the Great dies before an eclipse of the moon, a lunar eclipse before Passover. So Herod the Great tries to kill Jesus, so you’ve got to back up from there. So Herod probably dies in early March—somewhere in there. So we have to back off from that. December 25th is a possibility, but it’s really tight.

Matt Tully
Because Herod dies soon after Jesus’s birth.

Andrew Steinmann
Right.

Matt Tully
So we don’t have a lot of time in between.

Andrew Steinmann
We don’t have a lot of time in there, and you’ve got to get the Magi in, you’ve got to get Jesus going up to the temple in Jerusalem and being presented and seen by Simeon and Anna—all those things that we have in the infancy narratives in the Gospels. I think probably Jesus was born in the fall of the year. I think December 25th is probably a little late. Now, the church has never been bothered by that. We choose a feast day and celebrate it because it’s more important to us to celebrate the incarnation than it is to know what we can’t ultimately determine—the exact day of Jesus’s birth. In antiquity, most people didn’t know the day they were born on. They probably had a vague idea of the time of year that they were born. And this shows up in the Gospel of Luke. When Jesus comes to be baptized, Luke says he’s “about thirty.” He doesn’t say he’s exactly thirty. He says “about thirty,” which, as far as I can tell, means something like somewhere between the latter part of twenty-nine to the early part of thirty-one.

30:13 - Where Did AD and BC Come From?

Matt Tully
Another question that we often have is where did the AD and BC designations come from? What do those mean? Why do we use that in our thinking about our calendars?

Andrew Steinmann
This comes from the late antiquity, early middle ages, when one of the popes commissioned a monk named Dionysius Exiguus—

Matt Tully
What a name.

Andrew Steinmann
Yeah, quite a name. It’s just Dennis for short. So Dennis was commissioned to figure out the year of Jesus’s birth, and then that would become AD 1. AD is from the Latin Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. So AD is the first year of Jesus’s life. So he determines a date, and that became AD 1. Everything before that is BC, and you count backwards.

Matt Tully
What does BC stand for?

Andrew Steinmann
Before Christ.

Matt Tully
So why isn’t that in Latin like AD is?

Andrew Steinmann
I don’t know. I don’t know why that’s not in Latin, but that’s the way we do it. And technically AD should precede the date because it's “the year of our Lord” and then the number. We’re not in 2023 AD. We’re in AD 2023, if you’re going to be technically correct. Although people do the others all the time and everybody understands what they’re doing. So he determined a year. He’s probably got it wrong. I think he got it wrong by about two years. Some people think he got it wrong by four years, but I’m not here to tell you they’re wrong.

Matt Tully
This is why oftentimes people date Christ’s birth to 2 AD or—

Andrew Steinmann
Two or 3 BC. Somewhere in there. You can find some people dating as early as 4 or 5 BC, but I think that’s too early. I’ve written five technical papers on this. So Jesus was born probably late 3, early 2. And when Luke says he’s about thirty, when he comes to be baptized, he’s somewhere between twenty-nine and a half or something like that. He’s somewhere in that area, and that works out just fine because John begins baptizing in AD. And remember there’s no year zero. You go from 1 BC, one year before Christ, to AD 1, the first year of Jesus’s life. You have to be careful when going over that boundary between AD and BC. And you also have to be careful that BC dates count backwards. So 2 BC is later than 4 BC.

32:45 - The ‘ESV Chronological Bible’

Matt Tully
Right. You’ve got to imagine a number line, and you’ve got negative numbers in the BCs. Various chronological Bibles have existed for a long time. In your mind, what makes the recently released ESV Chronological Bible that you worked on distinct?

Andrew Steinmann
A couple of things. We’ve arranged it in 365 readings, so if you wanted to, you could do a reading a day. And each day’s reading covers between three and five chapters in the Bible. Not all chapters are created equal, so it’s somewhere in there; a reasonable chunk to read.
It contains introductions that I wrote to each day’s daily reading, and it contains the dates of the events, starting with Abraham and working all the way through to the end of the New Testament, that are based on my chronological work and a book I published in 2011 on that.

Matt Tully
With the introductory sections for every reading, what are those intended to do?

Andrew Steinmann
They’re intended to give you a quick overview of what you’re going to be reading, and depending on what you have been reading in the previous reading, it might also orient you to the era that you’re in. If you’ve been reading a bunch of stuff in the same era, they won’t necessarily do that because it’s assumed that that was done earlier. But it will try to orient you to what you’re reading and what’s coming in this passage—a general characteristic. And you get this when you’re reading sometimes in the old Testament but especially the Gospels in the new Testament, it will sometimes tell you, “Today you’re going to be reading from Mark and Luke because sometimes the Gospels have the same account in two or three Gospels. Rarely in four Gospels. The feeding of the 5,000 is all four Gospels, so you’ll read that all at one time.”

Matt Tully
So you bring those together in one reading.

Andrew Steinmann
Right. So it will try to help you sort that out too.

Matt Tully
One of my favorite things about this new Bible is this large foldout timeline that has dozens of specific events and people and periods and dates laid out on this large timeline. How do you decide what to include in that? Because I would imagine there were lots of things on your spreadsheet that you couldn’t fit onto this timeline.

Andrew Steinmann
The timeline is basically events that we can confidently date and that have a major significance rather than minor significance for Bible readers. A lot of that timeline and the credit for putting that together—and it was done really well—really belongs to the staff at Crossway. They consulted me here and there on that, but they just did an excellent job of taking what I had done and submitted and putting together that timeline.

Matt Tully
In a visual form.

Andrew Steinmann
I can’t take any credit for how well it came out, and it came out very well.

Matt Tully
Wonderful. Andrew, so much for taking the time today to talk us through this whole area of study of biblical chronology and explaining why it matters for us as Christians and as Bible readers, and then giving us a little bit of a taste of this new Bible that you’ve worked on.

Andrew Steinmann
Thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed it.

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