There's something in christian doctrine about Jesus being the perfect human. He never was an imperfect toddler who shat himself or an imperfect child that played in the dirty streets.
In a religious sense he was born as an adult, meaning with the soul and mind of an adult. So they can't depict him as a child.



As for the years 13-30, that's bad story-telling I guess. The authors can hardly depict him living a normal life, because then they would have to invent a reason WHY he lived a normal life for 17 years and WHY he suddenly started a cult when he was 30.

And that would raise all sorts of uncomfortable questions if Jesus is only a part-time Messiah.

Unsatisfying, though, I think.

Did Jesus flirt with girls as a teenager? Boys? I don't know. I wonder, though. Did Jesus ask uncomfortable questions of his parents? His rabbis? I'll bet he did, but I don't know.

Did Joseph need to use his rod to discipline the boy? That was typical in those days. I wonder.

So many questions. So few answers.

My fantasy is that we'll find a trove of contemporaneous documents equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls. There was a movie like that in the 1970s called "The Word." Major changes in the story and the Catholic Church was very upset about it.

Thanks for the reminder. Or was it a book? Irving Wallace wrote a book at that title in 1972. It was about the Gospel of James. Got it! It was made into a TV miniseries in 1978. I watched that.

and contain no biographical info

The oldest gospel seems to be the so-called gospel of Mark; its original title, however, was "The Beginning of the Good News." It starts with John baptizing Jesus

Clearly, stories of birth and childhood were not the original interest

After all, Paul was a Roman and the Canon was the Roman version of the Gospels. Who knows what manuscripts were tossed into the fire back in the days when the Canon was being assembled? So much writing to go through. The Biblical Canon we have as a legacy from the past is partly scripture and partly political in nature.

Of course, none of it is contemporaneous with Jesus. It's all what showed up at the end of the Game of Telephone that was being played for a couple of centuries or more. I can hear the committee now, "OK, that stays and this goes." Over and over again.

We know almost nothing, really, except what was deemed useful.

Nobody knows because whatever he was doing wasn't worth writing down.

The more puzzling question is why the Evangelists, lacking most of the details concerning their lord and savior's life, didn't just make some shit up? I mean, they obviously weren't above making shit up, because there's made up shit all over the place.

"Let's just leave all of this out, OK? It's bound to create confusion and raise questions. So, let's just not mention it. Toss that manuscript into the fire over there, won't you?"

So much time has passed. Millennia, really. There's no way to know.

In all likelihood, there are no details because there are no sources for that period of Jesus' life. He was the son of a carpenter. It's not like he was hanging out with a ton of literate people. By the time the Evangelists got around to writing the Gospels, anyone who knew Jesus during his childhood would likely have been dead already.

They weren't above bullshitting the circumstances of Jesus' birth, because the specifics were important scripturally. The messiah needed to be born in Bethlehem, so they cooked up a story explaining how a Nazarene pauper came to be born 150 km away in Bethlehem. The early Gospels didn't describe Jesus' awkward teenage years because there wasn't any reason to do so.

I will admit that I do not know. I have no way to know. I suspect there is no way, a couple of thousand years later, to know.

It all seems doubtful, in any case, so I don't buy it.

by John Prine. Don't know how to post the song from my phone. A little help please, someone post it for me.

In fact, I'd say there was material in some of them that is far more interesting than what the canonical gospels have to say.

Since that Canon became the official scripture of the RCC, it has been pretty much universally accepted by Christianity of all denominations. With very few exceptions, it is the official story. That there are other extant writings doesn't really alter that fact.

As an atheist, I'm looking at all religions from outside of them. I take each at its own declaration. The accepted scriptures are what interest me, since they form the foundation of that religion.

There are fragmentary and disputed additional writings, of course. Not as many as there once were, I suspect, though. The ones we have available probably still exist because they were not known at the time the Canon was set in stone. Given the authoritarian point of view of the Constantine church, I would be very surprised if contradictory manuscripts or documents were not destroyed during the process of creating the Canon. Either that or secreted away in inaccessible archives.

There was a process.

written decades after Yeshua might have died, I am told about orl history from those around him, including his family. They even remembered his exact words. But somehow none of them remembered a single thing from 90% of his life.