List of Religious Ideas in Science Fiction - Jesus

Jesus

• In Behold the Man (1966) by Michael Moorcock, the twentieth-century Karl Glogauer, a Jew obsessed with the figure of Jesus (and with Carl Jung) travels in time to the year 28 A.D. He meets various New Testament figures such as John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary, and discovers that Mary and Joseph's child, Jesus, is a mentally retarded hunchback, who could never become the Jesus portrayed in Scripture. Glogauer begins to have a mental breakdown and steps into the role of Jesus, eventually dying on the cross (having specifically asked Judas to betray him).
• In The Didymus Contingency (2004) by Jeremy Robinson, described by its publisher as "religious yet worldly", a scientist discovers time-travel and sets out to see Jesus' death and resurrection - only to witness several scenes not recorded in the New Testament and get proof that Jesus was a fraud. The dilemma of whether or not to make in the present a revelation which would shake the foundations of Christianity is mixed with the appearance of an assassin from the further future and further plot twists... (The Didymus of the title is the Apostle Saint Thomas, whose initial skepticism of the resurrection earned him the title "Doubting Thomas").
• The Last Starship from Earth (1968) by John Boyd is set in a dystopian society in the very near future, in an alternate timeline where Jesus Christ became a revolutionary agitator and was never subjected to crucifixion. He assembled an army to overthrow the Roman Empire, and established a theocracy that has lasted until the twentieth century.
• In Garry Kilworth's story "Let's go to Golgotha" (1975 - published in a collection of the same name), tourists from the future can book on a time-traveling "Crucifixion Tour". Before setting out, they are strictly warned that they must not do anything to disrupt history. Specifically, when the crowd is asked whether Jesus or Barabbas should be spared, they must all join the call "Give us Barabbas!". (A priest absolves them from any guilt for so doing). However, when the moment comes, the protagonist suddenly realizes that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is composed entirely of tourists from the future, and that no actual Jewish Jerusalemites of 33 A.D. are present at all.
• When the protagonists of Clifford Simak's Mastodonia make trips to the past commercially available, American church groups band together and seek to purchase an exclusive franchise for Jesus' time on Earth - not because they want to go there but because they do not want anyone at all to go there. The clergymen state quite forthrightly their apprehension that time travel would disprove some of the accounts given in the Gospels and thus undermine Christianity. When refused an exclusive Jesus-franchise, the church groups turn aggressive and energetically lobby Congress to ban traveling to Jesus' time, or even ban time travel altogether. This opens up an enormous theological debate, soon described as "the biggest religious controversy since the Reformation". The controversy remains unresolved by the end of the book, and meanwhile the pragmatic time-travel organizers concentrate on less controversial (and very lucrative) dinosaur-hunting safaris to the very distant past.
• In The Rescuer (1962) by Arthur Porges, scientists in 2015 face charges of having deliberately destroyed a three-billion dollar project. They tell the judges that instead of the carefully controlled experiment in time-travel they had planned, a religious fanatic had taken over the machine, and headed for Golgotha with a rifle and five thousand rounds. His attempt to save Jesus might have wiped out the entire present world as we know it, and the only way to stop it was by destroying the machine. The affair must be kept from the public, since some might identify with "The Rescuer".
• "Resurrection Day" by Thomas Wycoff is about a man sent back into time to steal Jesus' body to disprove Christianity.
• In There Will Be Time (1972) by Poul Anderson, a young twentieth century American discovers that he had been born with the ability to travel through time without any need of a machine. Reasoning that there must be others like him and that Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion is a good place to try locating them, he goes there and walks through the street singing the Greek mass, which is of course meaningless to people of the time. This does help him to get located by agents of a time-traveling organization, who take him to their headquarters in the far future - without having gotten to see Jesus at all.
• In the TimeWars series by Simon Hawke, set in 2461, Cardinal Lodovico Consorti proposes to use the recently-discovered time-travel technology in order to obtain empirical proof that Christ indeed rose from the dead after being crucified. In reaction, the Catholic Church excommunicates the Cardinal, with the Church hierarchy preferring to continue relying on faith alone and not seek such a factual confirmation.
• Times Without Number (1962) by John Brunner depicts an alternate reality in which the Spanish Armada conquered England. In this Twentieth Century, time travel is discovered - controlled, like much else in the world, by the Catholic Church. It is decreed that every new pope, on entering his job, would be privileged to travel to Palestine in the time of Christ's ministry. Everybody else is strictly forbidden to go anywhere near.
• In The Traveller (1954) by Richard Matheson, a professor who is a confirmed sceptic is for that reason chosen to be the first to travel in time to see the crucifixion, in a kind of traveling cage which makes him invisible to the people of the past. Seeing the actual scene, he feels an increasing empathy for Jesus, and finally attempts to save him and is hauled back to the present by the monitoring conductors of the experiment. He comes back a changed man - though he had seen no miracles, he did see "a man giving up his life for the things he believed" and "that should be miracle enough for everybody".
• The plot of Jesus Video, a German novel by Andreas Eschbach, revolves around the search for a hidden video camera that is believed to hold digital footage of Jesus recorded by a time traveller. The book, written in 1997, was adapted into a television movie called Das Jesus Video in 2002. The film was released in English under the title The Hunt for the Hidden Relic (or Hidden Relic).