Ever wanted to read the whole Bible? At one point or another most committed Christians decide to tackle God’s Word and if they’re anything like me they peter out somewhere in the Book of Numbers.
Of course, the Bible-industrial complex is willing to help you out—for a fee. When I worked at a Christian bookstore we used to sell “Bible in One Year” books that subdivided the tome into 365 equal parts. They came in all sort of variations, and even Catholic ones.
But now you can dispense with the expense and the paper book with the BiblePlan site. Give it your email address, your preferred translation (sorry, no Catholic versions), your language, and how much of the Bible you want to read in a year—Gospels, Psalms, Old Testament, New Testament, or the whole thing, Numbers included.
Keep in mind that if you select the whole Bible or just the Old Testament, you’re not getting the whole thing. Apparently they offer just the “crippled” Protestant version without all the books we Catholics get to enjoy. They call them Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical. I call them the complete Bible.
But even with those limitations, you might find the service useful anyway.
Image: Wikimedia Commons; in the public domain.
Way back when, I did find a Catholic site with a plan for reading the Bible in a year. It follows the liturgical calendar as best as possible, and splits thing up pretty nicely: http://www.presentationministries.com/brochures/ThroughBible.asp
The same site has another similar, but more general, guide: http://www.presentationministries.com/brochures/FrAlPlanReadingBible.asp
The term “deuterocanonical” is the Catholic term for these books.
Hence, the CCC:
“The Catholic Church accepts 46 books in its Old Testament canon, 39 protocanonical books and 7 deuterocanonical, so called because the former were accepted with little or no debate, while the latter (Sirach, Baruch, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom 1,2 Maccabees and parts of Esther and Daniel) were accepted only after centuries of hesitation (on the part of certain Eastern Church Fathers as well as Jerome); the Churches of the Reformation call these ‘Apocrypha.’”
You can also read the complete Bible + Catechism in a year with this nifty guide.