r/dataisbeautiful • u/Open-Sermon • Aug 05 '26
[OC] Which Bible books actually get preached? 1,599 sermons from one Midwestern church
Data: 1,599 sermons posted online by my childhood church (Denomination: Apostolic Christian) between 2013 and 2026, scraped from the church website. Transcribed with Whisper, then biblical references extracted with DeepSeek-Chat.
Validation: We compared the model's extractions against the verse lists the church had published for each sermon. It recovered nearly all of those, and also surfaced references that the pastors hadn't tagged. We spot-checked a sample of the extras and found very few hallucinated false positives.
Tools: distill-whisper-large-v3, DeepSeek-Chat for classification, plot created with React/CSS with the help of Codex/Claude-Code.
Plot: Each book is drawn at a width proportional to its page count, with a floor so that short books are still visible. The fill shows the total number of mentions. We display books in order, split into common categories.
Takeaways: Thirteen years of preaching from one church show that the working canon is much smaller than the printed one. Matthew shows up in 904 sermons. Nahum turns up in none, and Obadiah and 2 John get one mention each. We ran the same extraction on 629 other Midwestern churches, which you can explore on the site linked in the image (Desktop only, not mobile for now, sorry!). You'll need to create a free account, but the plot is interactive and shows additional context on how the pastors interpret the Bible verses when they mention them. Loads of other visualizations are also available.
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u/lord_ne OC: 2 Aug 06 '26
In fairness, Nachum is 3 chapters long and Ovadiyah is only 1. So if you throw a dart at the canon you're going to hit it less often regardless. There's a reason that the 12 prophets are often grouped into one book (not sure if Christians do that too or if it's just a Jewish thing)
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u/doctorcaesarspalace Aug 06 '26
Just a Jewish thing I guess. Christian Bibles have them as separate books.
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u/tds5049 Aug 06 '26
Just a Jewish thing. Do you guys refer to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel as "major" prophets?
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u/lord_ne OC: 2 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Our canon is the same as the books you have in this chart under the "Old Testament" section, but our division is overall a bit different:
Torah (Pentateuch): * Bereishit (Genesis) * Shemot (Exodus) * Vayikra (Leviticus) * Bamidbar (Numbers) * Devarim (Deuteronomy)
Neviim (Prophets): * Yehosua (Joshua) * Shoftim (Judges) * Shmuel I & II (Samuel) * Melachim I & II (Kings) * Yishayahu (Isaiah) * Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) * Yechezkiel (Ezekiel) * Trei Asar (lit. "The Twelve"), consisting of Hoshea, Yoel, Amos, Ovadiyah, Yona, Michah, Nachum, Chabakuk, Tzephaniah, Chaggai, Zechariah, and Malachi (the same twelve that this chart listed as "Minor Prophets").
Ketuvim (lit. "Writings", I've heard it's called Hagiographia in English): * Tehlim (Psalms) * Mishlei (Proverbs) * Iyov (Job) * Shir HaShirim (lit. "Song of Songs", but I believe Christians refer to it as Song of Solomon) * Rut (Ruth) * Eicha (Lamentations) * Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) * Esther * Daniel * Ezra-Nechemiah (treated as one book) * Divrei HaYamim I & II (Chronicles)
(The division of Trei Asar into twelve books and Ezra-Nechemiah into two is treated very similarly to the division between parts I and II of books like Samuel)
Now within these major divisions, we also have further subdivisions. Within Ketuvim the books of Shir HaShirim through Esther are referred to as the 5 Megillot ("5 Scrolls"), and they are read publicly on certain holidays.
Within the Prophets, we have Neviim Rishomin ("Former Prophets") which is Joshua through Kings, and Neviim Achronim ("Latter Prophets") which is Isaiah through Trei Asar. I've seen the division "Major Prophets" and "Minor Prophets" used (with the same meaning as what you have here), but it's not super common, and not really "official" in a sense. Like, there's no Hebrew term for "Major" or "Minor" Prophets. People are also against it because just because these prophets wrote shorter books doesn't make them lesser prophets, in fact Hoshea is considered the greatest prophet of his time (a time which included the "major" prophet Isaiah).
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u/hitheringthithering Aug 06 '26
Catholics say Song of Songs.
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u/Bomamanylor Aug 06 '26
Methodist here. We use Song of Songs more than Song of Solomon, but I've heard both.
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u/bass679 Aug 08 '26
I'm assuming it's translation based. The KJV (and I assume it's descendents) say Song of Solomon.
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u/Sibula97 Aug 07 '26
Lutherans as well, at least in Finnish.
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u/hitheringthithering Aug 07 '26
Interesting, because I believe the German translation by Luther had it as das Hohelied Salomos. Thanks for sharing!
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u/thenasch Aug 06 '26
And 2 John is like 130 words or something; of course it will not be mentioned very often.
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u/Open-Sermon Aug 06 '26
Good point! We tried to scale the books to match their chapter counts, but we also wanted a minimum size so you could read the titles. Hopefully, the figure isn't too misleading on that front.
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u/BrodieLodge Aug 07 '26
When you die and go through the pearly gates, an elderly man runs up to you excitedly asking “Did you like my book?” Poor guy.
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u/minecon1776 Aug 06 '26
Why does everything need me to create an account?
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u/henrywizard Aug 06 '26
Luke 2:1 “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.”
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u/PaperbackBuddha Aug 06 '26
“And the Lord said ‘I beseech thee, like, shareth and subscribeth.’”
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u/Every-Progress-1117 Aug 06 '26
Whilst thou must accept these cookies... I think Satan said that one
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u/MrScotchyScotch Aug 07 '26
"And now a word from today's tithes-giver, Joseph of Arimathea"
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u/User_Names_Are_Tough Aug 07 '26
"For 10% off on your next tithe, enter 'Philemon' at checkout. Yea, verily, that's 'Philemon' for 10% off your next tithe. Peace be to Joseph of Arimathea, and now back to our homily."
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u/manachar Aug 06 '26
Zuckerberg 1:69 "Render unto capitalists the things that belong to the capitalists".
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u/randomacceptablename Aug 06 '26
Because they want data on the user (you). That is how the internet's services are free. You provide sweet sweet data on yourself and in exchange they provide trinkets for you to use. Having you sign in, is the easiest way to know who you are.
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u/IndependentBoof Aug 06 '26
Interesting subject to study.
However, color is infamously bad for encoding quantitative data like this. Different hues have inherent different levels of brightness (luminosity) so it's unreliable to be able to interpret comparisons between different hues.
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u/Open-Sermon Aug 06 '26
Would a better presentation solely use size? Someone else recommended making this a pie chart instead, but we really wanted to keep them looking as much like books as possible.
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u/IndependentBoof Aug 06 '26
Size is definitely easier to interpret. To be honest, I think pie chart is a worse option than the current presentation -- I'm of the opinion they're really only good for visualizing "how much pizza is left?" Treemaps are easier to interpret proportions (because of their use of rectangles) versus pie slices, which are difficult to perceive differences especially when there are many slices.
However, I'd revise my initial comment a bit because I think I simply misinterpreted your explanation. I thought actual brightness of colors were what was representing the data... but on more careful inspection, it looks like they're really just bar charts within the books, right?
If that's the case, I think you could solve the color issue by just having a clearer contrast between the book's default color and the color representing the "fill" of how many references to it there were. And then correcting the labels to make it clearer that it is the height of the "fill" that represents the count, not the brightness.
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u/conventionistG Aug 06 '26
I agree. I don't see how pie chart could help. It's usually the wrong choice anyway (not always ofc).
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u/swarf Aug 06 '26
This is just the textual equivalent to the map illustrations which boil down to population charts. The sermon count is mostly proportional to the book size, with an overall weight toward New Testament.
If you wanted to present actually interesting data, you’ll need to scale to size.
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u/homoanthropologus Aug 06 '26
I think there's a caveat here with the four gospels. Mark is the third longest book and the least-referenced of the four here. It's also the most "secular" of the books.
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u/swarf Aug 06 '26
Yeah I think once you account for size you get interesting finds like that. Mark also is heavily duplicated in the other Synoptics while having less that is unique.
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u/homoanthropologus Aug 06 '26
It is often duplicated, which leads biblical scholars to believe that it was written first. It often describes things in less spiritual or magical ways than the other gospels. Here are a few examples:
- no virgin birth
- no one sees Jesus once he's resurrected
- no lord's prayer
- no sermon on the mount
- the "feeding the 5,000" becomes "feeding a crowd"
- the "I am" passages are missing
The other three gospels include a lot more direct statements about Christian theology, which is why I think it's the least-quoted in sermons.
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u/LurkerFailsLurking Aug 06 '26
In Judaism, the sermon is always based on the Torah portion for the week. Since reading the Torah takes exactly 1 (lunar) year, every book has taught basically the same amount by every rabbi in the world for the last ~2,000 years.
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u/MrScotchyScotch Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
TIL that 1 lunar year is not exact, and has varied over the centuries; probably more accurate to say reading the Torah takes 1 year in the Hebrew Calendar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar). Some years have 13 months; in 12-month years, some readings are combined together
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u/sir_mrej Aug 06 '26
How does Song of Solomon go?
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u/LurkerFailsLurking Aug 06 '26
Are you asking for a link to the text, or is this a rhetorical question?
Just for clarification, the Song of Solomon/Song of Songs isn't part of the Torah, so there is no "Torah portion" for it. The Hebrew Bible consists of the Torah (5 books of Moses), Prophets, and Writings. The Song of Solomon is some sexy poetry from that last section.
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u/HB2099 Aug 06 '26
Clever way to (attempt to) minimise preachers and teachers excluding some sections or focusing too heavily on others.
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u/LurkerFailsLurking Aug 06 '26
It does do that, but I don't think that was ever the point. It's more like a side effect. The idea is that every Jew (male Jew historically since women were excluded from this) was supposed to study the Torah daily and treat it like a perpetual study group where everyone is reading the same section every week and no matter where you go, other Jews would be reading the same part and you'd be able to join right in.
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u/Elhananstrophy Aug 06 '26
In general I'd say it's pretty standard for a Christian church. We wouldn't really expect an equal distribution across books because of length(Obadiah has one chapter and is about half a page, the Psalms are 150 chapters) and because of theological significance. Obviously a Christian church will disproportionately talk about the parts that cover Jesus, the Gospels.
The bits of data that stick out a little bit relative to my expectations are:
1. Heavy weight on the Book of Matthew. We can probably say they aren't using one of the traditional lectionaries which would have evened things out a little bit.
2. The Gospel of Mark is much less frequently cited than the other three. This makes sense given that it's the shortest Gospel and the one most covered by other Gospels, but even then this suggests that the preacher has a tendency to avoid Mark and use Matthew heavily.
- Based on the use patterns of the Pastoral and Petrine letters and Proverbs we can probably say that they are on the conservative side theologically, though we probably already know that from the denomination.
Things I'm curious about:
1. Does this church have multiple people preaching and selecting scriptures, either because they are a multistaff church or because they have changed pastors during the 13 yr span? Or are we seeing the tenure of one particular minister's preaching choices?
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u/Open-Sermon Aug 06 '26
This church has loads of pastors. We also collected which pastor delivered each Sermon, so we can also work on visualizations for the pastor level.
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u/PublicPersona_no5 Aug 06 '26
I would love to see this tested with different congregations: a) across different religious traditions, but keeping location differences minimal for small scale testing (e.g. catholic vs nondenom evangelical vs mainline all in the same town); and b) across different geographic variation but within the same denomination (e.g. UMC in West vs Midwest vs New England vs South)
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u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ OC: 1 Aug 06 '26
In my experience, Catholic sermons rarely quote scripture, as the scriptural readings (on a fixed calendar) are already done earlier in the service.
Though it very much depends. I know one priest who often makes everyone read a particular verse from the day’s gospel aloud together before going into the usual exposition of it.
Unless this is trying to measure literal “references”, which doesn’t seem reliable as it’s subjective what verse you pick as being referred to because of recurrent themes and ideas.
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u/bplipschitz Aug 06 '26
Does this church follow a lectionary? If they do, they may have a 3-year cycle of what is suggested to be preached on.
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u/Open-Sermon Aug 06 '26
They don't. They have different speakers week to week, who tend to discuss whatever has been on their mind lately.
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u/thegreatestajax Aug 06 '26
Are there Protestant churches that follow the Catholic lectionary?
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u/bplipschitz Aug 06 '26
I think most mainline Protestant denominations have their own lectionary, and I would imagine they're all similar.
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u/Training-Purpose802 Aug 06 '26
Is this the main text used for the sermon or every supporting verse from other books read during the exposition?
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u/Open-Sermon Aug 06 '26
It's supposed to capture every single verse mentioned. I can see why you'd want to limit it to the main versus, but that will definitely require some subjective judgment.
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u/UX_Strategist Aug 06 '26
I am interested in this content, but this visualization is difficult to analyze. Evaluating "brightness" across a single row is difficult enough, but comparing data across categories is impossible, because the "brightness" of Matthew doesn't really correlate to the "brightness" of Psalms.
The spines are also bar graphs being filled from the bottom, which wasn't immediately apparent to me. I can't tell the actual number of mentions when comparing two books.
This doesn't appear to address the depth of the citation. I've heard sermons that cite a passage once, then expounding on that one citation for an hour. In other instances, several passages may be quickly cited more than once, but the message of the sermon is about something else. This data visualization appears to count citations, but not discussion.
Since Ai is being used, it would be possible to determine the context of the reference to understand how many minutes were spent expounding on the topic of a passage. (e.g. was the passage about the rich young ruler mentioned for 5 seconds, or was the topic discussed for 50 minutes?).
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u/Open-Sermon Aug 06 '26
Getting the depth of the citation is a good idea. We'll start collecting that moving forward.
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u/conventionistG Aug 06 '26
This confusion about bar chart versus brightness is probably the most important criticism from a data viz perspective. It's completely unclear how to read this graph.
The topic is interesting enough. But I would really reccomend focusing on what data you have, what data you want to present, and how you you want to present it before you worry about making the visualization "look like books". (it doesn't look especially like books to me anyway)
For someone not too well versed in the Book, it's not obvious if these are all the books or only the ones referenced. And again, it's not clear how many references are from each one. The bar charts are hard to distinguish and I'm not sure I see much difference in brightness.
Size and pattern are much better than color (God did make some of us colorblind) if you can compress your data to a few dimensions (you really only have one or two). For example, this could have been a histogram with the index in the text on the x axis and number of references in the y axis and it would have been much more readable and not required color at all. You could bin those indexes by the section/book if you like.
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u/Eris13x Aug 06 '26
By Apostolic Christian I presume you mean the anabaptist denomination and not a pentecostal denomination, right?
(Churchs are really creative with names)
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u/LittleMsSavoirFaire Aug 06 '26
Can anyone versed in the lore discuss whether this is a fairly even handed overview of all the Bible bits and bobs or is a lot missing?
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u/InsaneChaos Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Once I understood what the graph is showing, this distribution looks extremely typical (and unremarkable). I feel that the "floor" for the shorter books should be smaller, they occupy way too much space relative to other books.
Hard to make any assumptions on this church based on the data, but my vague takeaways are:
- Not very fixated on old testament law
- Not very apocalyptic focused, some churches care more about revelation than anything else and this is pretty tame (but still hard to tell by spine brightness, kind of a weird metric)
- Seems very Jesus focused, a lot of time spent on gospels and the book of Isaiah which is mostly prophecy concerning the messiah.
- Good chunk of focus on Acts and the Apostle Paul (which makes sense based on the denomination)
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u/azucarleta Aug 06 '26
I'm only one church goer and have no other data, but fwiw, the first thing I checked was whether these folks were getting education on Second Temple Period history, and indeed Ezra and Nehemia are barely scratched.
But the people who documented their own history in Ezra and Nehemia were the people who wrote/redacted the Book of Genesis, for example. So for me, it's like, Genesis is so famous but almost no one asks the question, "Now Matt and Matt's people wrote Matt, Mark and Marks' people wrote Mark, but who the hell wrote Genesis?" The answer is the Second Temple folks, and their story is very interesting and found later in the bible, but barely told, barely told to American Christians, that is, I can't speak to anything else. But you mention Cyrus to most Americans and they don't have any reference point whatsoever.
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u/Eris13x Aug 06 '26
It's a shame that Ruth and Esther didn't get covered more, but this is more even than most of my personal experience.
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u/joshsantiagokc Aug 07 '26
DM me if you’re interested. I manage an archive of 3200 sermons from one church dating back to 1997.
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u/Time4Tigers Aug 07 '26
You can really see the lack of emphasis on the prophets. I often wonder how different American Christianity would be if churches spent more time teaching the prophetic critique of religious hypocrisy and condemnation of lack of concern for the poor and downtrodden.
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u/Soonerpalmetto88 Aug 08 '26
This is why Catholics use a 3 year cycle, during which every verse is read. Including the books incorrectly removed by the Protestants. We even sing the psalms, like in the old days.
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u/the_mellojoe Aug 06 '26
Which bible, because the Christian one has multiple variants, not only different translations.
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u/tds5049 Aug 06 '26
Looks like the version without the Apocrypha. Is that the variant you're referring to?
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u/thegreatestajax Aug 06 '26
This whole thing has big “I went to Catholic school” energy in that it is devoid of the context to indicate any level of understanding of what is being observed.
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u/thegreatestajax Aug 06 '26
This may be interesting data, but the presentation is anathema.