Are there reliable records of Jesus's life between ages 12 and 30?
A viewer asks whether there are any reliable documents about the life of Jesus between ages 12 and 30, and why this period is a mystery.
Answer
You will not find any trustworthy sources; the ones that exist were written to fill in events that never happened. The Bible does not cover areas of a person's life that are not directly or indirectly related to the redemptive, historical, salvific theme it is presenting. In the Old Testament you get only cross-sections of the lives of Joshua, David, Solomon, or Hezekiah, precisely because those sections bear on the redemptive theme running from Genesis to the Apocalypse. The gospel writers are just as judicious. The story of Jesus at twelve in the temple is important because he is at the age of discovering who his Father is, which matters in the redemptive scheme. After that, nothing was significant enough to record until his baptism around age twenty-nine, when the ministry begins. So the Bible is sticking to its purpose, covering only what is redemptively important, which is why the so-called hidden years are silent.