The most-preached scripture

Which parts of the Bible does the pulpit actually read aloud? We matched the sermon text against the public-domain KJV, ASV, and BSB translations and counted every passage where a verse is quoted or read — not merely mentioned by name. The chart ranks chapters by how many distinct sermons quote from them.

The headline: Mark 16 leads the corpus, and quoting scripture is the norm rather than the exception — about 98.8% of analyzed sermons quote at least one verse. Counted by raw quotations rather than by sermons, I Corinthians 15 leads instead — the chapters preachers quote at greatest length are not always the ones they reach for most often.

How to read the numbers

Each bar counts sermons quoting from the chapter. Detection is automatic verse matching with a confidence floor: paraphrase and loose allusion score below the floor and are not counted, so these figures under-count rather than over-count. A chapter read across several minutes of a sermon still counts that sermon once. A small share of recordings are not yet tied to a single sermon identity and are counted separately, so the sermon totals here run slightly high.

Methodology notes, honestly stated

Sample composition, honestly stated: sermon text is currently available for about 23,000 unique sermons — roughly 3.4% of the full catalog after duplicate discovery. Every figure here describes that analyzed subset, not the whole catalog. Matching against three public-domain translations means quotations from other translations are caught only when their wording stays close. All figures are aggregate counts only — no sermon text is reproduced here.