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Name: Iris Faye R. Aguilar Assignment: R.E

The Hidden Years of Jesus:

A Spirituality of Invisibility and Obscurity

One of the curious features about the Christian story is that we know nothing about Jesus before he began his public ministry around the age of thirty. We don't know what he looked like. It's only an inference that he followed Joseph as a carpenter. Scholars speculate whether he went to school. He left not a single scrap of writing. The Gospels of Mark and John don't even include birth narratives, but begin with Jesus as an adult. John Dominic Crossan has noted that ancient biographies often start with the public lives of their subjects, skipping over earlier years as irrelevant.

Still, it's hard not to speculate, especially when you consider that Mary could have told stories about her son. In the centuries after Jesus a genre of "infancy narratives" emerged to embellish the "missing" or "hidden" years of Jesus with fanciful legends. In the Infancy Gospel of Matthew animals speak at Jesus's nativity. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (c. 140–170), which Anne Rice utilized in her fictional Christ the Lord (2005), Jesus curses a playground bully who consequently dies, then raises him to life with a spontaneous wish-prayer. He turns clay pots into flying birds. In the Arabic Infancy Gospel (sixth century?) Jesus's diaper heals people, and his sweat cures leprosy. Other fables claim that when Jesus was twelve he sailed to England with Joseph of Arimathea and built a church near Glastonbury to honor his mother Mary, or that between the ages of twelve to thirty he studied in India, Persia, or Tibet.

The early church rejected these fables about Jesus as spurious, and instead followed the lead of the gospel writers by contenting itself with ignorance and silence about Jesus's early years. This reticence and restraint about the hidden years of Jesus are remarkable, and reminders that the early believers were not gullible and naive when it came...