Scriptures of the Early Church (Bible in a Year)
A whole-Bible-in-a-year plan in early-church reading order: the Old Testament in the traditional Jewish order, the New Testament by date written.
Printable PDF Open in Google Sheets
Most reading plans ask for an inconsistent amount of time from one day to the next — a single chapter of Obadiah one morning, the whole of Ephesians the next — which makes them hard to fit into a steady routine. This plan reads through the whole Bible in a year while keeping each day to a consistent, manageable length, and it orders the books roughly as the early church would have encountered them.
Less Than 15 Minutes a Day
Each day’s reading is balanced for length rather than chapter count, so most days run about twelve to fourteen minutes based on Audio ESV timings. Set aside fifteen minutes and you’ll finish each day with time to spare.
Psalms or Proverbs Every Day
Stretches of law and history can be hard going when they’re all you’re reading, so every day also includes a Psalm or a chapter of Proverbs to keep you from getting bogged down. Over the year you read through both Psalms and Proverbs twice.
The plan does not follow the modern, traditional order of the books in our Bibles. Instead it seeks to read the Scriptures as they were had and written in the early church. The Old Testament readings follow the TaNaK, the traditional Jewish ordering of the Scriptures into the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings — the structure in use when the apostles were authoring the New Testament. The New Testament is then ordered, as best we can tell from modern scholarship, by the date each book was written, and thus the order in which it would have been available to the early church.
The full day-by-day schedule is in the printable PDF and Google Sheet linked at the top of this page.