Stop 0. Twelve seconds

Take the whole age of the universe and squeeze it into one calendar year. The beginning is midnight on January 1. Now is midnight on December 31.

On that calendar, the earth forms in early September. The first people like us show up about twelve minutes before midnight. Writing appears in the last twelve seconds.

Everything anyone ever wrote down fits in those twelve seconds. Every king list, every letter of Paul, every newspaper. That is about 5,200 years out of 13.8 billion.

That is not a reason to feel small. The Bible opens before any of it: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). The God who made the whole year stepped into the last few seconds of it.

This walk has two pictures. The first shows the whole span. The second zooms in on the part people wrote down, and shows where Christians read it differently.

Picture: Chart 1, the gold box at the bottom.