Between the ages of 12 and 30, the life of Jesus Christ is unaccounted for.

There is no written record.

There are no tales told.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do many religious folks, and that's why many people have talked about these missing years and have tried to speculate about what Jesus might have done during that time.

In modern times, attempts have been made to fill in the missing years.

Wild stories of Jesus traveling to India to study with Eastern mystics.

Even Jesus appearing in North America.

Any good historian who's worth his salt will go with the earliest and best evidence.

Not later evidence, not wonky evidence, not evidence that contradicts all our earliest and best sources, you're going to go with your earliest and best evidence, and that happens to be Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

From historical research and recent archaeological work in Galilee in particular, combined with things that we can deduce from the Gospels themselves, we actually know a fair amount.

Bethlehem is where Christ was born, but the Gospels say his family left soon thereafter.

He went and lived in a town called Nazareth.

So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets.

He will be called a Nazarene.

This was not a party area.

This was not a happening place.

This was a kind of a quiet area in a lot of respects, a lot of farming that was going on, fishing that went on in the Sea of Galilee, and people that worked there didn't make a great deal of money typically.

The Gospels imply during the missing years, Jesus' status was blue-collar.

Once in the New Testament in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus' critics in his hometown ask, is not this the carpenter?

And then in the parallel text in Matthew they ask, is not this the carpenter's son?

There would not have been much work in Nazareth for Jesus, his father, or other craftsmen.

Instead, it's believed Jesus could have found steady work three miles away in the bustling town of Sepphoris, known for its elaborate mosaic artwork created by the Romans.

You can envision the family spending many years building houses, building furniture, building halls, assembling buildings with limestone and wood.

That's the family business.

The Nazareth region also provides clues to Jesus' level of education and his knowledge of the world.

The language of the region was Aramaic, and scholars are certain that Jesus spoke it.

The Gospels also say Jesus knew how to read, meaning he was educated during the missing years.

Apparently he knows how to read because he goes into the synagogue according to Luke and he reads from the scroll of the prophets.

He may not have been just a carpenter either.

Because Nazareth was close to the Sea of Galilee, it's possible Jesus went there to fish.

If he did, he most likely would have run into a group of fishermen, men who years later would lay down their nets and become his apostles.

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.

Then Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you become fishes of men.

It's written in the Gospels that Jesus had a father on earth named Joseph.

He appears several times in the texts, but disappears after Jesus teaches at the temple at age 12.

It makes sense to presume that at some point during this time he died and that Jesus would have had to deal with the death of his father and would have done the appropriate things as a son, namely attend to the burial services and attend to the various rituals and then be especially attentive to his mother and the needs that his mother would have had.

But being the one responsible for his family would not last.

There are clues in the Gospels that suggest Jesus would leave them behind.

In order for Jesus' ministry to work, he would have to shun the people closest to him, his brothers and sisters, and his mother.

He went walkabout.

He went out on tour.

He went out to do miracles and signs and wonders and preach and teach all over the place, leaving James and the other members of the family to take over the family business.

This in a small town would have been considered scandalous.

There is of course a great deal about those years that we don't know.

But what we do know is not insignificant.

And that is that Jesus grew up as a boy in the synagogue learning Scripture, drinking deeply from the wells of Scripture, experiencing firsthand the social and economic oppression of the Palestinian Jewish peasantry of his time of which he was a part, and envisioning a day, as he would later say, of a kingdom of God where the cause of the poor and the lowly and the disadvantaged would be championed over those who oppressed them.

By studying stories agreed upon to be true, a clearer, albeit hypothesized, portrait of Christ's life can emerge.