We know much about Jesus Christ: we know his parents and his journey to crucifixion, and we know his message and quest in life.
What we don’t know, however, is what Jesus did between the ages of 12 and 30.
Eighteen years are unaccounted for in Jesus’s Bible story, years that would be the most formative of his life.
Many theories have been proposed, like those in the 19th and 20th centuries which argued that Jesus had spent some of the lost time travelling in India and Nepal to attain spiritual enlightenment from Hinduism.
In 1945, a new and altogether more convincing explanation arose when a group of farmers digging for fertiliser in the Egyptian desert unearthed a series of documents that claimed to tell the story of Jesus’ missing years: the Lost Gospels.
The stories were not included in the New Testament, something which many scholars claim suggests they supplement the Bible and help to fill in many of the gaps that are otherwise unexplainable.
Around 52 gospel texts were found in a sealed jar by the farmers, collected in 13 leather-bound papyruses, dubbed the “Nag Hammadi library”.
It turned out that the early church had in fact sidelined the texts while it worked out what became the official version of Christianity.
The texts included some of the religion’s most early pieces of literature from the gospels of Thomas, Philip and Mary that had been buried away for around 1,600 years.
The Jesus represented in these texts was radically different from the one in the gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Rather than an individual who represented suffering, the human condition, and was the Son of God, this Jesus was a divine being whose mysterious sayings revealed unknown secrets about immortality and the world.
The four accepted gospels of the New Testament were already being taught in early church services and were likely written in the mid-to-late first century.
They were accepted as being written either by Jesus’ apostolic disciples or the followers of these disciples, though many were in fact written much later on in the second and third centuries.
Compared to the acceptance and open arms policy of the New Testament gospels, the Lost Gospels are at times elitist and speak of mysterious ways in which to find enlightenment through hidden meanings in Jesus’s words.
They also tell the story of a relatively unknown Jesus from his teenage years to before middle age.
One story in the Lost Gospels, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, sees an angry Jesus laugh out at the son of a man who previously rebuked Jesus for working on the Sabbath.
In the story, Jesus himself was only a child at the time and says to the man and his son: “You also should be like a tree without a root and not bear fruit”, before the child withers in Jesus’ presence.
Bart Ehrman, Professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, told National Geographic’s documentary ‘Secret Lives Of Jesus’: “The child’s parents then come and carry the withered child away bemoaning his lost youth, wondering what a child is that can curse somebody like this.”
Readers are also shown the light-hearted relationship Jesus had with his father, Joseph, something that is almost entirely left out of the New Testament.
One story tells how Joseph isn’t all that good a carpenter, despite it being his sole trade. He is hired by a rich man to make a bed in what will be a financial coup for the family, but he makes a mistake when he cuts the wood too short.
With no money to buy a replacement, he becomes distraught. When Jesus sees his father’s stress, he tells him not to worry. He uses his powers to stretch the board and restore the wood to its proper length.
Perhaps most controversially, the Lost Gospels say Jesus abandoned Jerusalem at the age of 13 in search of enlightenment in a far-off land.
That land was India, and he “intended improve and perfect himself in the divine understanding and to studying the laws of the great Buddha”.
This, of course, poses great questions for the Christian faith given that it suggests Jesus was inspired not of his own accord or through communication with a Christian god, but through another faith in the East.
Today, the Lost Gospels are sparsely accepted. One possible reason they did not end up in the New Testament is that they were not meant to be part of the idea cannon or to be read as scripture at Church.
Experts say that the scrolls may only have been intended to be read by a select few. Regardless, they paint a vivid and potentially enlightening version of Jesus Christ in his years that are unknown.
