Let's Go to Golgotha!
"Let's Go to Golgotha!" is a 1975 science fiction story by Garry Kilworth.
Time-travelling tourists go on a "Crucifixion Tour". The tour operator warns the tourists that they must not do anything to disrupt history: specifically, when the crowd is asked whether to spare Jesus or Barabbas, the tourists must all join the call "Give us Barabbas!". 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 AD are present at all.
"Let's Go" was originally published in the Sunday Times Weekly Review, on December 15, 1974; a Times contest-winner, it was Kilworth's first published science fiction. It has subsequently been republished in Gollancz - Sunday Times Best SF Stories, The Best Science Fiction Stories, Let's Go To Golgotha: the Gollancz - Sunday Times Best SF Stories, Constellations: Stories of the Future, Zielzeit, Les ramages de la douleur, Not the Only Planet, and The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories.
Reception
John Clute has referred to the story as a "heavily ironic parable", and Paul Kincaid has called it "excellent" and "a fine harbinger of career".