Our earliest historical sources tell us little about Jesus’ early years. Yet this silence not dissuade later writers from trying to fill in the gaps. For Luke, the third evangelist, Jesus was a Wunderkind – a child prodigy who dazzled his teachers in the Temple. Similar stories were told in later, more fanciful texts, such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which pictures the boy Jesus as courting the knowledge and power to work the miracles that would come to define his public ministry. When Joseph needed help around his workshop, Jesus was at hand to miraculously shorten or lengthen a piece of wood; when he went to school, it was Jesus’ teacher who was taught a lesson.
Other writers, too, have found a way to make the childhood of Jesus work for their own agendas. In the second century, the philosopher Celsus wrote a scathing treatise against the fledgling faith. Working from Matthew’s story of the Magi, he proposed that Jesus learned sorcery during his sojourn in Egypt and came back to Galilee a magician. In more recent times, Nicolas Notovitch’s The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (1894), proposed that Jesus spent his lost years learning Eastern philosophy in India and Tebet. Both writers use Jesus’ childhood to offer a different framework for interpreting his ministry beyond the traditional Christian mould.
Today, historians find little value in these stories – at least as they pertain to the historical Jesus. Indeed, many scholars of Christian origins, apparently content to follow the gospels’ lead, have left the subject of Jesus’ childhood in darkness. In their eyes, it is a subject for sensationalists and the press – not one for serious scholarship.
But is it really true that the history has nothing sensible to say about Jesus’ childhood? This is the question I pose in my recent lecture, The Missing Years of Jesus. Here I argue that while certainty alludes us when it comes to Jesus’ childhood, there is still a good amount we can say, filling in the gaps of Jesus’ context and working back from Paul and the gospels themselves. Below, I have attached a recording of the lecture, as well as an annotated bibliography, for those wanting to explore the topic further…