How to start reading the Bible from scratch
Short answer
Start with a Gospel, not with Genesis. Read one full chapter a day, at the same hour, instead of isolated verses. After the first Gospel, move on to the Acts of the Apostles, and only then go back to the Old Testament. Fifteen minutes a day carry far more than occasional Sunday marathons.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 8 min read
Almost everyone who decides to read the Bible starts the same way: page one, Genesis with enthusiasm, Exodus with effort, and a full stop somewhere in Leviticus. That is not a failure of faith or of discipline. The Bible is not one book, and reading its sixty-six or seventy-three books in the order they were bound is a bit like reading a whole library from left to right.
This article assumes you have never read the Bible cover to cover and want a route that actually works — not an ideal you will abandon in two weeks. Six practical decisions, and the last one is where most people get stuck.
Why starting with Genesis stops almost everyone
The order of the books is neither chronological nor instructional: it groups texts by genre and by standing within each testament. Leviticus, where most readers stall, is an instruction manual for the priests of one people at one moment. Reading it without context is like opening a civil procedure code expecting a story.
The result is always the same — the reader concludes they are not cut out for the Bible, when the actual problem was the route. Someone who starts where the text was meant to be entered reaches Leviticus later, and reaches it knowing why it is there.
Start with a Gospel
Mark is the shortest and the fastest: sixteen chapters, direct narrative, almost no digression. Luke runs longer and explains more, because it was written for someone who was starting from zero. Either one works. What does not work is starting with Revelation because it sounds interesting.
The reason to start with a Gospel is structural rather than devotional: everything before it points there, and everything after it departs from there. Reading the prophets before the Gospels is reading the clues before knowing there is a case.
1Since, indeed, many have attempted to set in order a narrative of the things that have been completed among us,
2just as they have been handed on to those of us who from the beginning saw the same and were ministers of the word,
3so it seemed good to me also, having diligently followed everything from the beginning, to write to you, in an orderly manner, most excellent Theophilus,
4so that you might know the truthfulness of those words by which you have been instructed.
Luke opens by stating plainly who he is writing for and why: someone who has already heard about all this and needs order and certainty. It is the only opening in the Bible that declares its own method, and it is why this is a good first book for a reader arriving with no context at all.
30Jesus also accomplished many other signs in the sight of his disciples. These have not been written in this book.
31But these things have been written, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and so that, in believing, you may have life in his name.
John closes by explaining the selection criteria of his own book: he did not try to record everything, he chose what carried the point. Knowing that a Gospel is a deliberate selection rather than an exhaustive report changes how all four of them read.
Fifteen minutes, always at the same hour
Frequency beats volume by a margin that is not small. Fifteen minutes a day add up to more than ninety hours of reading a year; three hours on one motivated Sunday add up to three hours and some guilt. The habit also protects comprehension: chapters read on consecutive days explain one another, and chapters read weeks apart do not.
Pick an hour that already exists in your routine and anchor the reading to it — before coffee, on the bus, after the house goes quiet. An hour with no anchor is an intention, and intentions do not survive week three.
2But his will is with the law of the Lord, and he will meditate on his law, day and night.
3And he will be like a tree that has been planted beside running waters, which will provide its fruit in its time, and its leaf will not fall away, and all things whatsoever that he does will prosper.
The psalm describes reading as something continuous, day and night, and reaches for the image of a tree planted by water: what sustains the tree is not the occasional flood, it is constant access. It is the oldest defence there is of daily reading over the marathon.
Read the whole chapter, not the isolated verse
The isolated verse is the unit of sharing, not the unit of reading. The division into chapters and verses was created centuries after the texts, to serve as an address — like a page number. Nobody wrote the Bible in verses, and nearly every famous misreading comes from treating an address as a complete sentence.
The practical rule is simple: read to the end of the subject, not to the end of the verse. If a passage stops you, read the ten verses before it before looking anywhere else. Most of the time the explanation is right there.
11But these were more noble than those who were at Thessalonica. They received the Word with all enthusiasm, daily examining the Scriptures to see if these things were so.
The text praises a group precisely for the habit of checking what they were being told against the text itself, every day. It is the opposite of accepting an isolated verse because it looked good on an image — and it is the behaviour this whole article is trying to describe.
Catholic or Protestant edition: which one to use
This question stops more people than Leviticus does, and it has a factual answer before it has a doctrinal one. The practical difference between the editions is the number of Old Testament books: the Catholic one carries seven more — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the two books of Maccabees — plus additional passages in Esther and Daniel. The New Testament is identical in both.
If you already belong to a community, use the edition it uses: you will want to follow along in the same text you hear read aloud. If you do not, the choice changes nothing in this article, because the Gospels and Acts are in both.
A plan for the first thirty days
This route fits into fifteen minutes a day and needs nothing beyond a Bible. It was built so that by the end of the month you have the whole central story — not a slice of every corner.
- Days 1 to 16: the Gospel of Mark, one chapter a day. The full narrative, start to finish, no shortcut.
- Days 17 to 20: the first four chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, which pick up exactly where the Gospel left off.
- Days 21 to 25: five psalms of your choosing, one a day. After twenty days of narrative, this is where reading turns into prayer.
- Days 26 to 29: the letter to the Philippians, one chapter a day. Four short chapters, and a first contact with the letter format.
- Day 30: reread the chapter that stopped you the most. Rereading on purpose is the part of the habit almost nobody does.
What to do when the text stops making sense
It will, and that is normal: these are texts written across more than a thousand years, in three languages, for readers who shared references you do not have. When it happens, work in this order — reread the previous passage, check the footnote, and only then look for outside help. Jumping straight to somebody else’s explanation teaches you to depend on it.
And it is worth separating two questions that tend to arrive together. "What does this text say" is a reading question. "What does my church teach about this" is a different one. The first you settle in the text itself. The second belongs to your priest or your pastor — no website, and no app, occupies that seat.
5But if anyone among you is in need of wisdom, let him petition God, who gives abundantly to all without reproach, and it shall be given to him.
The letter treats a lack of understanding as something to be said in prayer, not as a reason for embarrassment. For anyone starting out and feeling they should understand more than they do, it is the single most useful passage in the New Testament.