About
Method and sources
Christwiki tells the story of Christianity as one timeline, from the opening of Genesis to the present. It tries to do one thing well: show when and where each thing happened, how it connects to the rest, and what the evidence for it is.
At present it holds 361 events, 631 people, 254 places and 1,037 source records, besides the Bible itself.
Every claim is tied to a primary source
A primary source is the text or the object itself: Scripture; the works of ancient historians such as Josephus, Tacitus and Eusebius; the letters and treatises of the people involved; the acts, canons and creeds of councils; laws and edicts; inscriptions, manuscripts and artifacts; and, for modern events, the documents themselves.
In every narrative the citation follows the sentence it supports and names the passage: chapter and verse, book and section, canon or line. One click opens that passage. Citations look like this: (2 Kings 25:8–10) for Scripture and (Tacitus, Annals 15.44) for other sources. Hovering over the second kind shows what the source is and where it is kept.
Encyclopedias, textbooks and websites that summarise history are not cited. Where a source was written long after the events it describes, the entry says so. Modern scholarship appears only in the note on dating, where it is named as scholarship and not presented as evidence from the time.
The entries were researched and written with AI research assistants, working to the rules on this page. After an entry is written, a second pass that did not write it opens every citation and checks that the passage exists and says what the entry claims, and corrects or cuts what it cannot confirm. The date of that check appears at the foot of the entry.
No such process is free of error. That is the reason every sentence carries its source: a reader can check any claim in one click, and is invited to.
How dates are labelled
Ancient sources rarely state a year. Most dates are worked out from regnal years, synchronisms and later calculation, and some are far more secure than others. Every date therefore carries one of four labels, shown as a mark beside it.
- Firm date
- Fixed by contemporary documentation and not seriously disputed.
- Estimated date
- A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.
- Traditional date
- From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.
- Undated
- Narrated by the source with no datable setting.
Unless a date is firm, the entry has a section called “How this is dated” that names the evidence and says what remains disputed. Years are written with BC and AD. There is no year 0: 1 BC is followed by AD 1.
Whose account is this?
The site is written to be useful to Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant readers and to readers of no faith. It reports what the sources say and attributes it: “Kings says”, “Luke reports”, “according to Eusebius”. Where Christian traditions read an event differently, each reading is stated with a document of that tradition, and the site does not decide between them. Where historians doubt or debate an event, the note on dating says so.
Each event page lists the earlier events it grows out of and the later ones it leads to. Those connections, like the threads that run through the timeline, are the editors’ reading of how the story hangs together. They are a guide for the reader and are not claims taken from a source.
Choosing which moments count as “core” is itself a judgement. The selection aims to cover the Old and New Testaments, and then the Latin West, the Greek and Slavic East, the churches of Africa and Asia that lay outside the Roman empire, and the churches of the Reformation and of the modern global South.
Bible references
Every reference is checked by the site’s software: the book, chapter and verses must exist. References link to the passage in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition at BibleGateway, chosen because it is widely used across traditions and includes the deuterocanonical books. Where Scripture is quoted, the words are those of the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Other quotations come only from public-domain translations; everything else is put in the site’s own words.
The map
The map is drawn by the site from the public-domain Natural Earth dataset. It shows no modern borders or roads. Coastlines, lakes and rivers are those of today: the head of the Persian Gulf, the Dead Sea and the Nile delta looked different in antiquity, and the large modern reservoirs have been removed. Places are named as they were at the time, with the modern name on the place’s own page.
A solid pin marks a place whose position is securely known. A hollow, dashed pin marks one that is approximate, fixed only by later tradition, or disputed among scholars; the place’s page says which.
Limits
Links go to the best open copy that could be found: the holding institution’s own record, a scan of a printed edition, or a public-domain translation. A few sites refuse automated requests, and a few pages have moved; those passages were read in the Internet Archive’s copy, and the entry links to that copy where the original no longer opens. Where a source has no public-domain English translation, the entry puts it in its own words and the source record says so. Pages on the open web change, so a link that worked when the entry was checked may later break.
Corrections
If a citation does not support the sentence it is attached to, if a link is broken, or if an entry is unfair to a tradition, that is a defect and will be corrected. Please report it, with the page and the passage, in the project repository.
Credits
Map data: Natural Earth, public domain. Typefaces: Newsreader and Inter, both under the SIL Open Font License. The site runs without trackers or outside requests; fonts and map data are served from the site itself.
The text of the entries may be reused under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. The site is built with chronowiki, a theme for history wikis that anyone may use.