I was thinking recently that it would be fun to teach a class, whether about the Bible or history more generally, which approached it through stories about time travel to various times and places, and then looked at the actual historical sources.
A few recent posts on blogs I read intersected with this, bringing the Bible and/or Christianity into intersection with time travel. First, here’s an excerpt from a post by Arik Bjorn at Faith Forward:
With 20 centuries under its biblical belt, Christian history offers its fair share of landmark bloopers.
Major flubs that immediately spring to mind are the Great Schism, the Avignon Papacy, and that dreadful day in 2013 when Liberty University invited Kirk Cameron and Justin Bieber’s mom to speak at convocation.
If I could hop in a DeLorean and correct any single moment in the Holy Church space-time continuum, it would probably be the year 1551, in Geneva, when Robert Estienne, “royal typographer” and “printer in Greek to the [French] King,” translated the Latin Vulgate and added a formatting innovation to the New Testament: Verse Notations.
Click through to read the rest.
Next, Matt Young posted the image below. We learned a while back that Ken Ham is a Doctor Who fan. And so presumably time travel explains the existence of a crane in this story set in the stone-age. Or do we have reason to think that there was such technology during the paleolithic – which is when, according to Answers in Genesis, the story unfolds. In fact, the stone age starts after the Flood, and so perhaps they are of the view that there was more advanced technology previously which was lost in that global cataclysm? If so, they need to provide evidence. They can perhaps collaborate with Giorgio Tsoukalos, even if they interpret the alleged data differently.
Which other Biblical stories are improved, or make more sense, if time travel is added? What do you think about a class about the Bible, religion, or ancient history, which used modern science fiction time travel stories as a route by which to approach the relevant historical data and questions? Do you think it would be not only a fun but an informative course, and which books, stories, TV episodes, and movies would you recommend ought to be part of it?
Let me add just a couple more science fiction related tidbits from around the blogosphere.
First, IO9 had a round up of interesting church gargoyles, including the Darth Vader one I have mentioned here previously, and also this one (which, if it were not a modern addition during renovation, would have to be connected with time travel):
And finally, Michael Barber shared this image, which a youth minister he knows calls “St. Martha in Carbonite”:
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