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The aim here is to see the Bible's real production history clearly — not to cast doubt on it, but to see it whole.
This page pairs two things on purpose: what mainstream historical scholarship says about the Bible's setting, writing, and recognition as scripture, and what Restoration scripture adds to that picture. Toggle "Restoration data" on to see the second layer.
Narrative setting — when the events the book describes take place (e.g. Exodus is set c. 1400 BC). Composition — when it was actually written down, which is often centuries after the events, sometimes in stages. Canonization — when it was formally recognized as scripture by a religious community. Stacking all three lets you see the real gaps between story-time, writing-time, and recognition-time at a glance, instead of collapsing a book into one single date.
Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture and a teacher of learners — an entrepreneurship professor in the BYU Marriott School of Business who spends his working life helping people find and act on the best ideas and tools available to them.
He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU's Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This timeline belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.
He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.
Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.
Dating and confidence data compiled from the Biblical Dating Timeline master dataset (OT/NT book-level, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha book- and composite-layer data, Old Testament source-critical layers for Isaiah, New Testament synoptic pericopes, and Restoration data points).
Book covers in "Further reading" are used courtesy of Taylor Halverson's Study Library (books.taylorhalverson.com).
Typefaces: Newsreader and Karla, both open-source under the SIL Open Font License, served via Google Fonts.
Tap to show or hide a corpus
Tap to dim a confidence level
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Restoration data — standalone record
Not a Bible book, and not a revision of one — the Book of Abraham presents itself as Abraham's own record, translated by Joseph Smith 1835–1842 from papyri and canonized in 1880. It traditionally sits in the patriarchal era, c. 2000–1900 BC, contemporary with the setting of Genesis 12–25, and includes cosmology and creation material distinct from, though related to, Genesis 1. There is no mainstream critical composition date to compare it against — it stands as its own record.
Q&A
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Further reading, book by book guides from biblical scholar Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.
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