On February 16, one day after ISIS beheaded 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, “beheaded” was the fourth most-searched term on Bible Gateway.

The weekend after the US Supreme Court’s same-sex-marriage decision in June, searches for “homosexuality,” “abomination,” and “Sodom and Gomorrah” spiked. (So did “rainbow.”)

And in September, on the day of the total lunar eclipse, the No. 1 search was for “blood moon.”

Bible Gateway’s year-in-review data, based on 1.6 billion pageviews and more than 160 million visitors, reveals how people engaged the Bible on demand in 2015.

To start with, we tracked the popularity of Bible passages on a daily basis throughout the year. The results look a bit like a Rorschach test; but on closer observation, a few Bible-reading patterns emerge:

Most obvious is the predictable seasonal popularity of certain Bible passages, notably the Gospels at Easter. And as we’ve seen in past years, a significant number of Bible readers do make it all the way through the Bible (or a specific portion of it) by the end of the year.

Conventional wisdom (not entirely unfounded) holds that most eager Bible readers, fresh off a New Year’s resolution to read through the entire Bible, hit a wall after Genesis. But our data shows that a strong core of Bible Gateway visitors — enough to show up clearly on the data — persevere throughout the year.

Read the article “What 160 Million People Searched Scripture for in 2015” on christianitytoday.com.