Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles. Episode 1.1.

All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles.

In 1871, Sebastian C. Adams, a schoolteacher and minister from Oregon, created a magnificent time chart of history that he called the synchronological chart.

It was huge, a veritable textbook of information and a riot of color, where the fortunes of each nation were depicted as a river of time.

He had it printed by the best mythographers in the United States.

It could be purchased as a scroll or in accordion format, 700 millimetres tall and over 5 metres long.

That's 2 feet by 16 feet. Eventually it was picked up by other

publishers, in the United States and the United Kingdom, and has remained a bestseller to this day.

My own edition of this handsome book is only 450 millimetres tall and 2 metres long when unfolded.

But that is quite enough, one and a half feet by 7 feet.

My particular facsimile has been reprinted no less than 19 times just since 2003.

You can get this wonderful work from any major bookstore at a very reasonable price.

The facsimile I own is a modestly reworked and updated copy of the original,

although you will not find Adam's name anywhere in the credits.

Adams started his history in 4004 BC, the date of

creation famously popularised by Archbishop Usher. As I'll discuss in a later episode, we actually

have no idea how the bishop arrived at that date. Adams at first followed the lines of the

patriarchs, then after the Tower of Babel, he traced the history of the great nations, starting

of Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, and Babylon. In this podcast, I will show how 150 years of research by archaeologists and biblical scholars

has overturned everything that Sebastian Adams believed about the history in the Bible.

Now, I do not claim to be objective because I believe that the word objective has no meaning outside

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