Adventures in the Bible

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A Sister Trope to Excellent Adventure, Adventures in the Bible is a Time Travel-type Story where a young person (with or without a guardian) goes back in time to experience a story that we all know and love. Education Ensues.

Unlike Excellent Adventure, which deals with history that's supported by multiple sources (e.g., photographs, witnesses' accounts, documents, etc.), this trope covers events (The Trojan War, for example) that usually have only literary sources (such as Homer, Vergil, or Dares the Phrygian), the veracity of which may be challenged by scholars. As such, these stories straddle the line between history and literature.

A Staple of Religious Edutainment.

Examples of Adventures in the Bible include:
  • The short story A proof in time. It doesn't end well for the time traveler.
  • The Flying House and Superbook both have this as a premise.
  • Let's Go to Golgotha! by Garry Kilworth features time travel vacations back to view the Crucifixion.
  • Dark Passage, by Junius Podrug, features a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits going back in time to prevent the Islamic extremist terrorists from killing Jesus before his crucifixion.
  • Madeline L'Engle's Many Waters has the Murry twins going back to the time of Noah's Ark.
  • The Greatest Adventure Stories from the Bible.
  • Happens frequently in Adventures in Odyssey, though usually it's Virtual Reality.
  • The Family Guy movie had Stewie's future self going back in time to see Jesus; his sleight of hand tricks prove a little disappointing.
  • Several times, the Stationery Voyagers find that events from Bible Times will somehow directly impact their mission to save the universe.
    • The Drisalian Curse event is a stand-in for the Tower of Babel.
    • A Mikloche Warrior defends the baby Minshus and his parents from a Drismabon seeking to alter the course of history.
    • Due to where the Lakeith Pit is buried following Minshus' death and resurrection, the Drismabons seek to invade it in their plot to destroy the universe.
  • In Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, Karl Glogauer, the protagonist, is shocked to find Jesus to be deformed and mentally incompetent. Trapped in the past, Glogauer gradually assumes the identity of a Messiah.
  • In the time-travel-humor webcomic Times Like This, Cassie witnesses firsthand the birth of Jesus, while Matt has some fun with the dead, decapitated Goliath.
  • Og Mandino's The Christ Commission, in which an atheist mystery writer is sent back to Judea six years after the end of Christ's ministry and assumes the role of a Roman official investigating his trial and execution.