The Catholic Bible needs a different schedule, because there are extra books in its Old Testament. These are the Apocrypha, consisting of 14 book of which 1 and 2 Maccabees and 1 Esdras are the main documents. 1 Maccabees is an historical account of the struggle of the Maccabee family and their followers for Jewish independence from 167 to 134 BC. 2 Maccabees covers the same ground but dramatizes the accounts and makes moral and doctrinal observations. Other books are Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, and The Wisdom of Solomon.
Since neither Jesus nor the apostles make any reference to the apocryphal books, Protestants have regarded their authority as secondary to that of the 39 books of the Old Testament. Martin Luther, in his Bible translation of 1534, extracted the apocryphal books from their usual places in the Old Testament, and had them printed at the end of the Old Testament. He stated that they “are not held equal to the Sacred Scriptures and yet are useful and good for reading.” After that, many Protestant Bibles omitted them completely. However, in 1546 the Roman Catholic Council of Trent specifically listed the apocryphal books approved by the Roman Catholic Church as inspired and they are always included in Roman Catholic Bibles and are usually interspersed among the books of the Old Testament.
Note that the reading schedule is based on the “Chronological” model, where each reading is in the order the events actually happened.
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DISCLAIMER: These Bible reading plans are a compilation of many others you will find on the internet. Variations or similarities will not affect your ability to read the Bible in one year.
Dave and Shari Grenier 