OYB
Where did the concept of the One Year Bible originate?
In his autobiography, Dr. Kenneth Taylor, founder of Tyndale House Publishers, describes how he received this idea “directly from the throne of God.”
Following is an excerpt from My Life: A Guided Tour:
“For several years I had been asking God to tell me how to get more Christians to read the Word of God. I knew from personal experience how easy it is to read through the books of Genesis and Exodus, then get bogged down and quit.
Billy Graham’s interesting idea
I remembered that Billy Graham had once said he tries to read some chapters from the Old Testament each day, some from the New Testament, and a Psalm or two, plus a few Proverbs. The Lord seemed to say to me, “Why not publish a Bible with 365 daily sections—with each day’s reading selected from those four parts of the Bible?”
The opening page of this Bible would be headed January 1st, and for that day the reading would be the first chapter of Genesis, the first chapter of Matthew, the first Psalm, and the first few verses of Proverbs. The reading for January 2nd would include the next chapter of these book. On December 31st, the entire Bible would have been read that year.
I took an old Bible, cut it apart, and pasted up a few sample pages in this dramatically different form. I convinced myself that the idea was practical and that it would take only fifteen minutes a day for the average reader to read through the entire Bible in a year.
To my surprise, the Tyndale House executives were not excited about my great idea! In fact, there was almost unanimous dissent. They felt that people would not use such an unusual organization of the Bible, and the project was voted down. We consulted a group of managers of large Christian bookstores. They too were sure that it would never work.
The president of the company [at the time], explained the many reasons why I should forget it and asked for my agreement to drop the matter.
‘No,” I said. “Let’s go ahead anyway.’
So we did. Our sales manager proposed the title The One Year Bible. Since then several million copies have been distributed, and many, many people have written to say they have read the entire Bible for the first time.”
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I was delighted with the mental picture of Dr. Taylor sitting down, slicing up pages of the Bible, and rearranging them into a particularly readable form. And it was all the more remarkable to learn the original idea had come from a daily practice of Billy Graham.
Dr. Taylor is right about getting “bogged down” in certain (Old Testament) sections. There are genealogies, censuses of tribes, lists of the histories of kings (most of them horrible), judgments upon nations and kingdoms that go on for many chapters.
However, in this format, you then turn your attention to a portion of the New Testament. Depending on where you are in your reading, it will be the life of Christ, or the birth of the Church, or the letters of Paul and other writers, or the glorious, apocalyptic visions of John. Then a Psalm and a Proverb or two.
And on December 31st, you will sit there and realize that you read through the entire Bible in an interesting, manageable way. And, hopefully, on the following day, you’ll open up to January 1st and start all over.