Where was Jesus between the ages of 12 and 30?

by Ryan Turner

The New Testament does not speak much about these "missing years."  Other than the short mention of Jesus being 12 years old and speaking with various Jews in the temple and amazing them all (Luke 2:39-52), we have relatively little information about Jesus' childhood, teenage, and 20s years.  Other late apocryphal gospels try to bridge this gap in information such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, etc., but these apocryphal works are written quite late and really are not regarded by even the most skeptical scholars as giving us an accurate portrayal of Jesus.

The best thing that we can say for now is that it was not the first century Gospel writers purpose to talk about the childhood years of Jesus in much detail so we really do not have much to say about them.  I think that we should focus on what we can know about Jesus rather than what we do not know.  For ancient historical records, we have a lot of information about Jesus life, death, and resurrection.  It is there that we should focus since the resurrection is the foundation upon which Christianity is built (1 Corinthians 15:17; cf. John 2:19-21; Matthew 12:39-40).

 

 

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