(ec) I got a request from Michael Paul Heart to give an opinion here.  I'm not quite sure why - have I made some small edit to the article in the past? I can't remember.  It's not on my watchlist, nor something I feel a particular stake in.  So I consider myself pretty uninvolved. 

 Having looked at the article, I think the timeline is (at least mildly) useful.  The focus of the article appears to be to present, in some comprehensiveness, all of the different contending translations and glosses that have been given for this biblical word.  As such it comes over as incredibly bitty  X said this, but Y said that, but Z said the other, but AA said something else again.  It's good to have the detail of what X, Y, Z and AA said somewhere in the article; but it doesn't make for easy readability, and the detail is a lot more than can be comfortably held (at least in my head) all at once.  I think what MPH has done therefore is quite useful.  It allows the reader to skim-read first to get an idea of some of the different contentions in play, then see the chronological evolution of different translations, then go back to have a second pass at the earlier presentation, this time perhaps taking in more of the detail. 

 One principle of journalism, which does I hope at least sometimes get applied in the science and maths articles that I sometimes haunt, is to think of trying to put over information in a pyramid structure  starting with something quite simple, quite narrow, and quite focussed; and then only gradually widening it, deepening it and piling on detail.  Compared to that the current article arguably front-loads an awful lot of detail  which is why, at least in my view, it may come over as so bitty.  MPH's approach of adding quite a succinct time-line at the end I do personally find for me does help to give a second, progressive structure and shape that all the different bits can fit into, making them easier to assimilate.  So I think, at least for me, I did find it helped; and tucked away at the end of the article, it certainly doesn't take anything away from the article's principal readability.   

 An alternative might be to move the detail of what X, Y, Z and AA said out of the initial thematic grouping and into the later chronological section.  Lightening the weight of detail in the thematically arranged sections, in line with the "pyramid" view of article structure, might make them less bitty and easier to assimilate.  (Alternatively, more of the detail could be moved to the referencing/footnotes).  My fear though would be that even lightened in this way, those sections might still come over as unthreaded and bitty, while the extra detail would make the chronological summary less readable, leaving the article with two contending hard-to-assimilate presentations, which would actually be a step backwards from where it is today.  But worth still at least putting up for consideration. 

 On the narrow question of the article as it is today, personally for me I find that the timeline is helpful, and I don't think there's any way in which it harms or hampers the article, so I'd suggest keeping it.