Why is there no record of Jesus after his childhood until he began teaching?

Answer 1

A:

It is necessary to understand the history of the gospels themselves in order to understand why there seems to be a gap in the record of Jesus' life.

The four New Testament gospels were anonymous until speculatively attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John later in the second century. Thus, we do not really know who wrote the gospels. New Testament scholars have established that Mark's Gospel was the first to be written around 70 CE. By placing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke in parallel and reading them synoptically ('with the same eye') in the original Greek language, they have shown that Matthew and Luke were substantially copied from that original gospel, with further sayings material attributed to Jesus taken from the hypothetical 'Q' document. In fact, it appears unlikely that the authors of Matthew and Lukeknew anything about the life of Jesus apart from that which they learnt from Mark's Gospel.

Mark's Gospel is therefore the most reliable source we have for the life of Jesus, yet it only begins with the baptism of Jesus. Until Matthew was written some ten to twenty years later, nothing was known about the birth or childhood of Jesus. Mathew's Gospel filled that gap, telling how Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the time of King Herod and that Joseph and Mary fled with him from Bethlehem to Egypt, where they seem to have spent the early years of Jesus' life. Later still, Luke''s Gospel told a different story about the birth of Jesus, and how he was born in Bethlehem during the reign of King Herod but also at the time of the census of Quirinius some ten years after Herod's death, and that soon after the birth of Jesus the young family returned peacefully to their home in Nazareth. Uta Ranke-Heinemann (Putting Away Childish Things) is one scholar who says that the nativity accounts in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are, with respect to time, place, and circumstances, a collection of legends.

If Mark knew nothing about the life of Jesus prior to the start of his mission, and if the stories of the birth and childhood of Jesus are just legends, then the absence of records of Jesus later childhood and early adulthood is simply due to no one having written trustworthy tales about this period.