Religion Timelines: Jewish History + Christian History

On the Stoa Consortium, Juan Garcés draws attention to a post on Semantic Humanities which references this remarkable new utility from MIT:

Simile: Timeline
Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.

Of particular interest in our area is the following:

Religion Timelines: Jewish History + Christian History

Move your mouse around see different parts of the timeline, and click on selected features to get more details on given events. We NT nerds will want to argue with a lot of the basis for the timeline, e.g. Q dated to the mid 60s and Paul's epistles to the 70s and 80s doesn't make a lot of sense, but if some of the data that has provided the basis for the timeline could be corrected, this is a fantastic tool. I was listening to a feature on Today on Radio 4 yesterday in which the question was being asked about whether British school children know enough of the grand sweep of history, the broad narrative, as they were calling it. (You can take their How's your history test to see what your knowledge of British history is like. I'm ashamed to say that I got one wrong!) Well, this kind of timeline project could very much help in encouraging students to get something of a feel for the "what happened when", the "card index" element of studying history. It's a great resource.