The First Bible on the Moon

The Bible has been all over the world - and missions organizations like Wycliffe Bible Translators are bringing it everywhere else. But did you know it has also been out of this world and to the moon? Well, it turns out NASA secretly carried it there, fairly recently.

[In] early 2006, Mitchell arranged for me to have one of the bibles that landed on the moon. And they were microfilm bibles, due to the size and weight restrictions on the Apollo aircraft. The (astronauts) could only carry 18 ounces in their personal preference kits, which were 4 by 6 inches. And on that microfilm was all 1,245 pages of the King James Bible...

The quest to land a bible on the moon was born out of the fire that took the lives of the Apollo 1 astronauts, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White. Ed White was a very all-American religious guy, and during Gemini 4 he carried in the left leg of his spacesuit a gold crucifix, a St. Christopher medal and the Star of David.

Before his death, he had told a reporter that if he got to the moon on Apollo 1 he planned to carry a bible with him. His death had a profound effect on Reverent Stout. And he vowed that he would see a bible landed on the moon in Ed White's name. The first microfilm bible went up on Apollo 12. Only, due to an error in stowage, it was stored in the command module and never landed on the moon. So with that, Reverend Stout got a larger group of bibles and asked the Apollo 13 crew to take it to the moon. And, as everyone knows, there was an onboard explosion on Apollo 13 and so they returned to earth with the bibles without ever landing.