How this site handles the canon

What we treat as Scripture

BibleTimescape treats the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired, inerrant Word of God — the Canon. Every event on the timeline is anchored to those books, and every Scripture quotation on the site comes from them.

One canon, counted differently

You may meet different numbers for the books of the Bible, and most of that difference is arithmetic, not substance. Ancient Jewish reckonings counted twenty-two or twenty-four books because they grouped the same material differently: Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles as one book each, Ezra and Nehemiah together, the twelve minor prophets as a single Book of the Twelve. Split those groupings apart and you arrive at the same content our sixty-six books carry. The substantive question between traditions is a different one: whether certain additional books belong in the Canon at all.

Helpful to read, but not the Canon

Those additional books — the Apocrypha, called deuterocanonical in some communions — include works like the books of the Maccabees, which give the fullest ancient account of the temple's desecration and rededication between Malachi and Matthew, events Scripture itself touches at Daniel 11 and John 10:22. These books are helpful and good to read. They carry real history, and the church has always read them with profit. But they are not part of THE Canon, and this site never treats them as though they were. The same is true, further out, of ancient historians like Josephus.

So when an event's narrative rests substantially on such a book, its card says so plainly. You will always know whether you are standing on the Bible's own testimony or on the testimony of valuable, uninspired history. Keeping that label visible costs a sentence here and there; it purchases trust everywhere else.