How long each part of the Bible takes
| What you read | To yourself | Aloud |
|---|---|---|
| A Protestant Bible (66 books) | 51 hours | 66 hours |
| A Catholic Bible (73 books) | 58 hours | 76 hours |
| An Orthodox Bible | 59 hours | 77 hours |
| The Old Testament, Protestant | 39 hours | 50 hours |
| The Old Testament, Catholic | 46 hours | 60 hours |
| O Novo Testamento | 12 hours | 16 hours |
| The five books of Moses | 10 hours | 13 hours |
| The four Gospels | 5 hours 29 minutes | 7 hours 8 minutes |
| The Psalms | 2 hours 50 minutes | 3 hours 41 minutes |
| Marcos | 58 minutes | 1 hour 16 minutes |
The Psalms are the longest book, a little under three hours, with Jeremiah close behind. Mark, the shortest Gospel, can be read in one evening, and the average chapter takes about two and a half minutes. Spread across a year, a Protestant Bible comes to about eight minutes a day, and a Catholic or Orthodox Bible to about ten.
Which order to choose
de Leitura in the order of your Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is how most of us first try, and it gives each book whole. Reading in time order follows the events as they happened: Job among the patriarchs, each psalm whose heading names a day in David’s life beside the chapter that tells of it, the prophets in the reigns their first verses name, and Paul’s letters where Acts shows him writing them. Reading the New Testament and the Psalms is the gentlest start: Jesus’ life and the early Church, with the Psalms spread among them, the prayer book he quoted on the cross (Matthew 27:46, Luke 23:46).
Catholic and Orthodox Bibles
A Catholic Bible has 73 books: the 66 of a Protestant Bible, with Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch, and longer Esther and Daniel. An Orthodox Bible holds these and 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151 as well. Choose your Bible above and the plan reads its books in its own order. In time order each sits beside the story it belongs to: Tobit among the exiles in Nineveh, Baruch after Lamentations, the Maccabees just before the Gospels. The plan numbers the psalms as most English Bibles do, so in a Psalter with the Greek numbering most of them are one lower.
When a day slips by
Days slip by for every one of us. When one does, read today’s reading today and let the missed day wait for a quieter one, rather than trying to read three days at once. A plan is only a help along the way, and the word itself is the light we are walking by: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).