Forward

This is a topic that opponents to Christianity will often attack and ridicule.  As we all have heard or read in text books in school, universities and scientific entertainment multi-media, the estimated age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years old based on radiometric dating, but Christians state the Earth is not that old based upon adding up the generations in the scriptures through present day.  (More on understanding the age of the Earth in the next section of this topic.)

From the Christian perspective, there are a few charts that add up the lineages in the scriptures, starting with Genesis to the time of Jesus Christ, and then adding the proposed years since the estimated year of Jesus Christ's death on the Cross. 

One of the more widely known chart timelines is from James Ussher and John Lightfoot who calculates the first day on Earth, after Genesis 1:2 is October 23, 4004 BC, which has been disputed because:

• Incorrect use of 365.25-day years, instead of 360 day years, up until the Long Day of Joshua, then using 365.25 day years.
• Incorrect estimations of deaths of many people in the scriptures, where the assumption was a death would occur on their birthday.  In other words, there was a rounding down of years where someone might have lived to weeks before their next birthday, so there could be a loss of almost a whole year.  (Note: we are only born once and the term birthday is really a celebration of the anniversary of the birth of someone.)

The second timeline often mentioned is from Edwin R Thiele, who wrote "A timeline of the Kings of Israel and Judah".

The third timeline often mentioned is one from the Roman Catholic church that uses is a slightly different variation but still is very close.  Here is a great link that details information on the use of the Septuagint's chronology.

It is this author's opinion that the two bullet points on James Ussher's work also apply to almost all timeline estimations, but all three estimates are most likely very close to being accurate, which is also honoring God.  In the secular world, on an estimation on any area in history, there is often no negative arguments to an approximation, where all Christians can take the same approach to reading details on Biblical Generational Charts.

Additionally, there needs to be mentioned that are also some great Jewish and Jewish Christian sites that state the Earth began roughly in 3760 BC.  This also shows the difficulty in calculating the time of the beginning from Genesis 1:2 forward.

Age of the Earth

See the topic on the Age of the Earth as a helpful introduction to understanding the scriptural and scientific answers.

One of the most important points that this author has not seen in any Biblical Commentaries:

The Chart

This author spent some time looking through the charts online from many wonderful Internet sites.  As stated above, the timelines are an approximation where the important point to know when ever discussing the timeline is to be aware of the Gap Theory and Age of the Earth Topical points.

This a very wonderful link from the Bible Hub, to help with the simplest way to correlate events with scriptures.  There are many dated years shown that some of us would quibble about, but it is a very nicely done list.

Note that one of the many, many proofs of the Gospel being written at the time period after Jesus Christ's crucifixion is the phraseology and warning in specific verses which reference the Temple in Jerusalem still standing, where it was destroyed in approximately 70 AD.

The Biblical Timeline from the Bible Hub