THE MISSING YEARS: Why We Know Almost Nothing About Jesus Before He Was Thirty

Between the age of twelve and the age of about thirty, the New Testament preserves nothing about Jesus at all.Not a little. Nothing. Two of the four gospels contain no birth narrative and no childhood whatsoever. Paul, who wrote earliest, says almost nothing about Jesus's life at all. One episode survives from those thirty years - in one gospel, occupying twelve verses, set when he was twelve years old.That silence has been filled many times over - with India, with Britain, with Egypt, with Japan, with the Essenes at Qumran. This book examines every one of them, and applies a single standard throughout.This is not a book that attacks the gospels, and it is not a book that defends them. It reads them as ancient documents, alongside Plutarch, Suetonius and Josephus - all of whom skip their subjects' childhoods, because ancient lives did not narrate them.Which reframes the whole question. The silence is not a gap where something used to be. It is the original condition of the record - and the reason nobody filled it says a great deal about what the gospels were actually written to do.20 chapters. Six parts. Eighteen years, and why nobody wrote them down.