I can find a use for that word.

to have shared the view that the biblical texts were a reliable guide to history

In a very vague generic sense, it's plausible that those texts incorporate some of what was known when they were first written

For example, Ussher's estimated date for the creation of the world, from his attempt to reconstruct a chronology from the texts, falls about halfway between the current estimates for the emergence of proto-writing and the later bronze age emergence of materials recognized today as genuine writing. So it's entirely plausible that the Hebrew writers drew on a tradition that had a reasonable if rather approximate notion of when people living together in civilized circumstances first appeared

Similarly, Ussher thought he could date Noah's flood to 2348 BC; the Noah story has been known since the 19th century to contain features taken directly from the Gilgamesh saga; and Gilgamesh is currently believed to have reigned in Uruk somewhere around 2500 BCE, which again suggests the biblical authors at least knew the approximate age of the story

And Ussher thought he could date the exodus to 1491 BC. Prior to the story of the flight from Egypt, Exodus 1:11 relates They put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. Current dates for the reign of Rameses I are around 1290 BCE and for Rameses II around 1280-1210 BCE, while the Pithom area is now believed to have been occupied between 1700-1600 BCE and then largely unused for about a thousand years. This might indicate the authors of Exodus had some access to a tradition that roughly indicated to them something about the age of Pithom and something about the era of Rameses

Likewise, Ussher thought he could date Nebuchadnezzer's seige of Jerusalem to 607 BC; the currently accepted date for his capture of Jerusalem seems to be around 597 BCE

It's easy to sneer at Ussher today, since it seems clear to many of us that the biblical texts are not history books, and since only some fundamentalists take Ussher's chronology seriously. Considered as a product of its time, however, it was a serious piece of scholarship, and Ussher was not alone in producing such chronologies. One can consider such works as perhaps shedding some light on what their history might have looked like to the authors of the biblical texts, even if one doesn't regard the stories in the texts as necessarily true, in which case it seems possible that those authors weren't entirely ignorant fabulists but were heirs to a tradition that did hand them some rough knowledge of timelines in their part of the world. Modern methods seem to give better results, but the methods we have today are often developments from methods

...beyond the acceptance that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is that it's the COMPLETE word of God. Why should anyone assume that all dates are accounted for, and that there wasn't a period of 10, 50, 100 years when nothing notable happened?

project

There are traditions, of fine and ancient lineage, in both Judaism and Christianity, for non-literal readings of texts

But even before Luther's reformation, the texts themselves became the focus of power-struggles in Europe, as is clear (say) from official reactions to Wyclif's bible beginning in the late 14th century

These struggles continued unabated when Tyndale was burned in the 16th century for the crime of translating the texts: it was nearly a century later, that Tyndale's wordings were imported wholesale into the King James version

These struggles left an imprint on Protestant theology, including an emphasis on widespread reading of the (once inaccessible) texts

Of course, the authoritarians immediately and thereafter interpreted that emphasis as a demand for literal readings of an "inerrant" text, since such interpretation provided them with useful arguments for their own authority over others

...and was that the Julian or Gregorian calendar?

Any blogger who dates his blog in Latin is way ahead of me.