Home to staff-wielding doom-croaking prophets, Philistines, miracles, and loads of people in big robes who sit tableau-like around tables or rocks, looking awe-filled and reverent. It may sound simple on paper, but ”Biblical Times” is a very nebulous label, and trying to reconcile religious stories with historical fact is a notoriously tricky business.
To start with, the dates and accuracy of many biblical events are hotly disputed. The Israelite Exodus, for instance, has been traditionally dated to around 1400 B.C.E., give or take a few centuries. However, since there are no records of the Exodus besides the Bible itself (barring some really specious readings of the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt around 1550 BCE), the majority of secular and religious scholars agree that it never actually happened, or at least nowhere near how the Book of Exodus describes it. The rest of the Old Testament dates from roughly 1000 B.C.E. to 500 B.C.E., and the New Testament places the death of Jesus around 30 C.E. Keep in mind though, that it's unlikely any of these dates are completely accurate, due to the millennia-long game of telephone that has been played with Biblical translations, conversions between different calendar systems over the years, and that many stories were likely transmitted orally for a long time before being written down.
Place can also be as diverse a factor as time. Although events are usually centered around the area of Ancient Israel - Jerusalem, especially - they typically overlap with the timelines of many other civilizations, including Ancient Egypt (Book of Genesis and Exodus, particularly Moses), Ancient Babylon and Persia (Ezra, Daniel and Esther), Ancient Greece (parts of the Deuterocanonicals/Apocrypha), and Ancient Rome (the entire New Testament, especially Jesus Christ).
Since The Bible covers such a broad span of time, this Trope is much more useful as a determiner of location and setting rather than actual time period; Moses was about as ancient a figure to Jesus as Jesus is to us.
If Time Travelers go back to one of these periods, they will probably have Adventures in the Bible.
Popular tropes from this time period are:
- As the Good Book Says...
- The Chosen One
- A Day in the Limelight: Usually an expansion of a background character's fates, or Elsewhere Fic about an Original Character meeting a canon character and having his life changed as a result.
- Do Not Do This Cool Thing: While the two empires more often than not provide villains of these stories, it is much rarer for them to not make a case for the glory that was Rome, or the splendor of Egypt.
- The Final Temptation
- Moses in the Bulrushes
- Sword and Sandal
Works that are set in this time period include:
- The Renaissance: Much of the most famous art produced during this period arguably fits the trope, due to the omnipresence of religious themes:
- David
- The Last Supper
- The Sistine Chapel
- Ben-Hur
- The Bible: In The Beginning...
- Exodus: Gods and Kings
- From the Manger to the Cross
- The Gospel According to St. Matthew
- The Gospel of John
- The Greatest Story Ever Told
- History of the World Part I (in places)
- Jesus aka The Jesus Film
- Jesus Christ Superstar
- Joseph
- King David
- The King of Kings (1927)
- King of Kings (1961)
- The Last Temptation of Christ
- Monty Python's Life of Brian
- Moses
- The Nativity Story
- Noah
- The Passion of the Christ
- Paul, Apostle of Christ
- Peter And Paul
- The Prodigal
- Risen
- The Robe
- Samson and Delilah
- Sodom and Gomorrah
- Son of God
- The Story Of Jacob And Joseph
- The 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, as well as the fifty-minute prologue of the 1923 silent version.
- The Visual Bible: Matthew
- The Dudley Moore comedy Wholly Moses!
- Year One
- The Young Messiah
- Ben-Hur
- The Bible. Duh.
- The Cartoon History of the Universe (the first couple of volumes)
- Discworld: Small Gods is set in the Discworld equivalent of Biblical times.
- Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
- The Last Temptation of Christ
- The Letters From Nicodemus
- Many Waters
- The Red Tent
- Quo Vadis
- The Winds of Zarr
- The Troy Saga
- Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era
- Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
- Children of Eden
- Jesus Christ Superstar
- The You Testament
- Civilization from V onwards tends to use this aesthetic to represent the "ancient era", as opposed to the Inventing the Wheel motif present in previous games.
- The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible
- Joseph: King of Dreams
- Judas and Jesus
- The Lion of Judah
- The Prince of Egypt
- VeggieTales (in some episodes)
- Joshua and the Promised Land
