A Sister Trope to Field Trip to the Past, Adventures In The Bible is a Time Travel-type Story where a person (usually young, with or without a guardian) goes back in time (usually to Bible Times) to experience a story that we all know and love. Education Ensues.
Unlike Field Trip to the Past, 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, Virgil, or Dares the Phrygian), the veracity of which may be challenged by scholars. As such, these stories straddle the line between history and literature.
If they take a major part in the story, that's You Already Changed the Past, Been There, Shaped History, or You Will Be Beethoven.
A Staple of Religious Edutainment.
Examples
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Audio Plays
- In the Big Finish Doctor Who story, Relative Dimensions The Doctor mentions he once took Leonardo da Vinci to the birth of Christ so he could check the lighting for Adoration Of The Magi.
Fan Works
- The Doctor Who fanfic A Word To The Wise
by Agrippinilla. Possibly subverted in that it's a first person account of a meeting with the first Doctor by one of the Biblical characters...
- Done via Imaginarium instead of time travel in the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "The Smurf Of Solomon", as Empath tries to find out who "the Beloved" in the Song Of Solomon that Smurfette was enamored to is. Played straight through time travel in "Smurfed Behind: The Passion Of The Smurfs" when the Smurfs visit Jerusalem during the time of Jesus' death and resurrection.
- The Jakkid Fanfics: Phoenix Wright, at one point, gets sucked into his bible for the sake of defending Jesus Christ himself in court. He later returns in his ultimate Call-Back story, Phoenix Wright: Turnabout Portal. Though, despite the events of The Bible being touted as the past, jakkid presents the events of the bible as taking place in their own world - specifically, Bible World.
- Subverted in A Very Kara Christmas when Superman tells his cousin he cannot travel back to the time when Jesus lived because the time-stream is blocked by an intangible barrier or "discontinuity".
Films — Live-Action
- It doesn't actually occur, but in Back to the Future, the Doc says that one could witness the birth of Christ as he sets the time circuits to "DEC 25 0000". Of course, there was no year zero nor is it especially likely that Jesus was actually born on Christmas. Bob Gale has indicated that this bit was meant to be taken as a joke.
- The religious film The Daylight Zone, which is a parody of The Twilight Zone, where a man who doubts Jesus existed is sent back to meet him personally.
Literature
- The childrens' picture book series Alice in Bible Land has Alice (a young girl in the 20th century) go through a portal to "Bible Land", where she observes various events from the Bible. In rhyme.
- Let's Go to Golgotha! by Garry Kilworth features time travel vacations back to view the Crucifixion.
- Also by Kilworth, the impressively-titled The Lost Garden of Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, Lucy Atwell and the Rest of the Lads of the 32nd Parachute Regiment has a scientist trying to eliminate death from the world by travelling back to the Garden of Eden and convincing the Serpent not to offer Adam and Eve the Forbidden Fruit by explaining that it will be punished by loss of its limbs. He succeeds, but when he checks things out during his return to his own time he finds that Adam and Eve are still the only people on Earth - without Sin they never left the Garden and never had descendants. He goes back and tries to change the Serpent's mind but it isn't interested - though it does taste the Forbidden Fruit itself. The scientist escapes to his own time just as God's Wrath descends on the Garden, but when he arrives he finds his own arms and legs have vanished, and a family of limbed serpents regard him with horror...
- Tennis Shoes Among The Nephites features time travel to The Book of Mormon events . . . that is, until the fifth book. The cast expands exponentially by the twelfth book, and they are all spread across several times and continents in both Bible and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints canon.
- 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. Which is strange, considering Jesus is still a respected prophet in Islam, and Islam didn't exist while Jesus was alive (in fact The Qur'an says Jesus was spared crucifixion as God replaced him with a double, so real Muslims would probably view such a thing as a terrible crime)...
- Madeline L'Engle's Many Waters has the Murry twins going back to the time of Noah's Ark. Unlike most examples, this one keeps the well-known part of the story (Noah) hidden for quite a while so, unless you're really up on your Old Testament, you don't even know you're reading a Bible story until about half way through.
- Og Mandino's The Christ Commission has a skeptic brought back in time to investigate the Resurrection.
- In Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, Karl Glogauer, the protagonist, travels back in time to meet Jesus and is shocked to find him to be deformed and mentally incompetent. Trapped in the past, Glogauer gradually assumes the identity of a Messiah.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who;
- The First Doctor serial "The Myth Makers" involves him and his companions going to see the Trojan War. In fact, companion Vicki winds up leaving the TARDIS and becoming a mythological figure herself, Cressida.
- The Doctor says he was present at the original Easter in Planet Of The Dead but gets cut off as he's explaining what actually happened.
- Parodied in a MADtv (1995) sketch where Jesus meets the Terminator. He gets increasingly annoyed because the Terminator keeps interfering to prevent his entire Inspirational Martyr death.
- The Red Dwarf episode, Lemons has the gang trapped on Earth in the past and meeting Jesus, even bringing him to the future to get his appendix out. In the end it turns out he wasn't the same Jesus from The Bible.
- Inverted in Present Time, a religious children's show about a laptop time machine that can summon biblical figures to the present.
- The Time Tunnel did this a couple of times:
- In "Revenge of the Gods," Doug and Tony get mixed up in the Trojan War.
- In "The Walls of Jericho," they end up at the siege of Jericho (as portrayed in the Book of Joshua) and become the two spies mentioned in the Biblical text.
Music
- Kids Praise: The 7th album involves time travel while the kids learn about how praise songs have been written over the centuries, and the first two stops are in Bible times: King David while he was still a shepherd boy playing on his harp, and the dedication of Solomon's Temple.
Webcomics
- Spoofed in one strip of Shortpacked!, in which the manger is crowded with time-traveling kids and the Animaniacs.
Joseph: My wife is giving birth here. Do you people mind?!
- 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.
Western Animation
- 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.
- In My Time with Jesus, the characters have Imagine Spots where they are in biblical times during some event that took place in the Bible.
- Joshua and the Promised Land: a boy named Joshua in a world of anthropomorphic animals is taken back in time by his guardian angel and inserted into the body of the Biblical Joshua to witness the events of the Old Testament from Exodus up to the fall of Jericho first-hand.
- Most VeggieTales episodes had a countertop scene, then cut to the characters acting out a Bible story. But "Josh and the Big Wall" tells the story of Joshua and Jericho through Bob and Junior imagining that they're in the story, and Junior gives the Israelites a Rousing Speech when they're about to give up, affecting the plot. (Though Bob keeps reiterating that it's still just a retelling)