Forbidden History - Jesus: Mystery of the Missing Years

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

What happened to Jesus between ages of 12 and 30? In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast we explore the mystery of Jesus Christ's "missing years" from ancient legends to modern theories, and what they reveal about faith, history, and the unknown... Cast List: Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. We know the beginning. A manger in Bethlehem. Shepherds in the fields and wise men from the east. And we know the end.

A trial, a crucifixion, and a resurrection that changed the world. But what about the middle? Somewhere between the nativity and the final ordeal, Jesus simply disappears. One of the most intriguing aspects of the New Testament in the life of Jesus are the missing years. We get the story of Jesus being born, we get him being presented at the temple, and then he disappears. And he only comes back again, pretty much the last six months of his life, before he's crucified, what we call his ministry. There are theories that he either wasn't crucified

or he somehow survived the crucifixion, something that's called the swoon hypothesis. There are a few scattered moments in the Gospels, his presentation at the temple, a brief episode at the age of 12, but then silence. A silence that lasts nearly two decades. It's a mystery that's puzzled Scotland,

and believers for centuries. They've been very eager to fill that gap. And what's surprising is that they depict Jesus as a very rebellious and actually quite violent teenager. In fact, when people upset him, he kills them. Where did Jesus go in these missing years? What did he do? And more importantly, what shaped the man who would go on to reshape history?

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we examine the missing years from the timeline of the life of Jesus. Today we're joined by investigative historian, journalist and author Tony McMahon. There's a big gap between about the age of 12, right through to the age of 30. So what's happened? That's the biggest gap year in history. We don't know anything about the teenage Jesus, his 20s. he just disappears. Now this is the Son of God who's come down to Earth and he just vanishes.

So of course that's really intrigued Christians down the centuries. A centuries-long game of fill in the blanks, from medieval legends and mystical visions to Islamic traditions and English folk tales. Theories about these missing years are as fascinating as they are far-fetched. And that's where our journey begins.

When the Gospels fall silent, imagination often fills the void. Throughout Christian history, countless believers have tried to explain the unexplainable, piecing together lost years from scraps of folklore, artistic vision, and unorthodox theology. During the medieval period, some of these efforts were quite literal. One interesting example still survives today, hidden in plain sight, in a museum in London. If you go to the medieval gallery in the British Museum and keep your eyes peeled, you'll see on one of the walls there's something called the Tring tiles. They date back to the 1300s.

They were a number of tiles that were found in the 19th century in an antique shop. Thank goodness they were found. The tiles are not ordinary decorative ones. They're theological artwork. Visual storytelling crafted by Christians of the 14th century who were determined to imagine what Jesus might have been like as a child. Think of them as biblical fan fiction baked into ceramic. And they were identified as being medieval, that they were six, seven hundred years old.

And what they depict is the life of the child Jesus, but these are stories that medieval Christians, when you could say invented. But they invented them to fill the gap in the Bible. And what's surprising is that they depict Jesus as a very rebellious and actually quite violent teenager. These weren't the familiar images of the infant Christ were used to. Instead, they show a young Jesus who, when angered, strikes out with terrifying power. A boy who kills and resurrects, who turns childhood games into divine retribution. It's disturbing, it's blasphemous to some, but to medieval minds it was perhaps a way of wrestling with a deeper question.

If Jesus was fully divine, but also fully human, What was he like before he mastered compassion? In modern Christianity, Jesus is often seen as the embodiment of perfect love, turning the other cheek, blessing the meek. But in the medieval imagination, the young Jesus was something else entirely, divine, but dangerous. The tring tiles don't just fill in the gaps, they unsettle them. In fact, when people upset him, he kills them.

And basically, he has to be asked to bring them back to life. There's parents of one child don't want to allow their child to go out to play with Jesus because he has a bad reputation. And he pulls the kid through the lock of a door miraculously. This is the Christ's child as a force of supernatural wrath, punishing rudeness with death, flexing miraculous power like a tantrum. He's making mud cakes one day, a kid kicks him over, he kills him, and then brings it back to life.

So it's a very strange series of images, but it shows how medieval Christians were trying to fill that gap. Stories like these weren't just told for entertainment. They were experiments, attempts to imagine how a God in training might have lived and lost control. Versions of this concept appear in other ancient texts as well, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where a five-year-old Jesus curses, blinds, and even strikes dead those who cross him. It is unsettling, a divine child growing into divine wisdom, a story of evolution, not perfection. And for medieval believers, these stories didn't just answer questions.

They provoked new ones. More coming up after the break. By the time of the Roman Empire, the western coast of Britain was a valuable hub in a global trade network, particularly for its deposits of tin and lead. Some believe that it wasn't just goods that traveled these routes, but Jesus himself. Investigative historian, author, and journalist Tony McMahon, Tony McMahon, explains more. One of the stories about the young Jesus is that he came to Britain, to Britannia, the Roman province of Britannia, what's now England, with his uncle, or great uncle, according to some accounts,

Joseph of Arimathea. Now, the story runs that Joseph of Aramathia was a tin and lead merchant, and these were actually important commodities for making weapons and other tools in the Middle East. According to local legend, Joseph of Arimathea, the man said to have donated his tomb for Jesus after the crucifixion, traveled to Southwest England on business. And in some versions, he brought the young Jesus with him. And it is true that the West of England was involved in a global trade across the Roman Empire in these metals. Now, the story runs that Joseph Aramathia basically comes on a business trip to England and he brings. Jesus with him and according to legends in the English county of Somerset

Jesus and Joseph Arimathea ended up in a village called Priddy. The village still exists. A remote Somerset settlement near the Mendip Hills where ancient mining tunnels dot the landscape. Local folklore claims Jesus lived there absorbing native spiritual traditions before returning to the Middle East. They lived there for a while basically trading in metals. And it's even said that Jesus got his hands dirty as a miner, even mining led in the local hills. And the idea as well is that while he was there, he studied with the druids and he picked up the wisdom of the druids before going back to begin his ministry. This isn't just fringe mythology.

The legend was immortalized in the 18th century hymn, Jerusalem, penned by William Blake. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green? A poetic nod to a deeper, long-standing folk belief. But the tale doesn't end there. And then after that he's crucified, of course. Joseph of Arimathea has this cup which holds some of the blood of Jesus. That is the Holy Grail and he returns to Somerset. He returns to where he had been with Jesus so many years before and he buries the Holy Grail at Glastonbury.

And of course that is where he founds the first Christian church and still today there's a stream there at Glastonbury that bubbles up red water. Now scientists will tell you that that is oxide and devout Christians will tell you that is the blood of Jesus coming out of the Holy Grail at Glastonbury. So that's one of the stories about what happened to Jesus and his trip to England. The idea that Jesus traveled east during his so-called missing years isn't a modern invention. It has deep roots spanning Islamic theology, Western mysticism, and even 20th century tourism. In 1908, an American mystic, a guy called Levi H. Dowling, wrote a book book called the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ. And in it he detailed the travels of Jesus

from India to Tibet and Persia to Egypt. And this is a kind of, you know, a very long gap here that Jesus is on. And he's talking to priests and Brahmins and mystics and basically picking up all this wisdom that will eventually become Christianity. Now, you might ask, how did Dowling come to know all this? Well, he claimed that it came to him. visions, in dreams. And his ideas about this Aquarian trip of Jesus became very popular, not surprisingly, in the 1960s. Dowling claimed the material came to him in a trance, channeled through visions. His book placed Jesus on a pan-Asian pilgrimage, learning from Hindu gurus, Buddhist monks, and Zoroastrian sages. The result was a spiritual narrative that blended

east and west, one that would explode in popularity during the 1960s counterculture movement. But Dowling's idea wasn't exactly original. Centuries earlier, a lesser-known branch of Islam had developed a very different theory, one based not on visions, but on lineage and geography. But it has been a theory that actually predates Dowling the idea that Jesus went to India. It was actually a theory that was taken up by a branch of Islam called the Ahmadiyah. And they were convinced that Jesus came to Kashmir. Dowling maybe heard these stories and incorporated it into his theory.

But the Ahmadiyah Muslims believed that Jesus came to India to Kashmir and studied with local priests. And they believe that he is actually buried in Kashmir. And you can visit a small temple at a crossroads in Kashmir, which claims to have his body. That site still exists, the Rosabal Shrine in Srinagar, where a simple tomb lies under a faded wooden structure.

Pilgrims and curious tourists visit the grave each year, though mainstream Christianity and Islam both reject the claim. And after his death, the disciple Thomas is believed to have gone to India to convert the local population to Christianity. So here's another theory then that Jesus, in that intervening period in those missing years, went on a very long trip around the Middle East, the East, to pick up Buddhist, Hindu, all kinds of wisdom

that became part of Christianity. In this version of events, the Jesus who returns at age 30 is not a Messiah, but a mystic, a man shaped not only by the Hebrew prophets, but by Vedic hymns, Buddhist sutras, and Persian fire temples. During the first century, the Middle East wasn't just a crossroads of empires, it was a melting part of ideas. Trade routes carried more than goods.

They moved the spread of ideas across vast distances, from Athens to Alexandria, from India, Judea. Some theories of Jesus' missing years suggest that he may have absorbed these ideas firsthand. Of course, it would be really outrageous to most Christians to suggest that Jesus was influenced by Buddhism. Now, I'm assuming that the logic there is that the whole idea of reincarnation influences ideas, the idea of the resurrection. But the idea as well of living in peace, is something that's then reflected in Christian theology. The idea that Jesus was influenced by Eastern teachings

has long been controversial, particularly in Christian traditions that hold Jesus' teachings to be entirely divine and original. But some scholars have pointed out striking thematic overlaps between Christianity and Buddhism. Compassion for the poor, non-violence, self-sacrifice, self-sacrifice and the possibility of transcending suffering.

There's also, as well, the alleged influence of the ancient Greeks. There were these Greek philosophers that used to wander around the Middle East, the cynics. They were kind of itinerant, roving philosophers, and the ideas that Jesus on his travels encountered some of these people as well, and that he picked up also Greek ideas, which then became incorporated into Christianity. The ancient cynics were a sect of radical philosophers, roaming ascetics who rejected all conventional desires for wealth, power, social recognition, and conformity.

Their influence can be traced across the Levant during the centuries before and after Christ. Some modern scholars have compared the Sermon on the Mount with cynic teachings, particularly in their calls for humility, non-attachment, and and spiritual independence. That's not so outrageous really because the Middle East was very Greek influence, very Hellenic influenced. Alexander the Great had conquered the whole of the Middle East, remember, all the way through to India. So there was a massive Greek influence on Christianity. And the idea that Jesus himself may have been influenced by the Greeks

in his various rovings as a young man, not completely daft. The belief that Jesus absorbed Greek or Eastern wisdom suggests that he lived, as the gospel's claim, among real people in a real world filled with different ideas. The missing years of Jesus are usually associated with the period before his ministry. But for some theorists, the real mystery begins after the crucifixion. A fringe set of beliefs proposes that Jesus did not die on the cross. at least not in the way mainstream Christianity insists. This controversial idea is known as the swoon hypothesis.

When we talk about the missing years of Jesus, we normally talk about those years between him being presented at the temple and then starting his ministry, you know, where did he go in his teens and his 20s? But some people argue that there are missing years after the crucifixion because there are theories that he either wasn't crucified or he somehow survived the crucifixion. According to these theories, Jesus was crucified but did not die. Instead, he fell into a state of unconsciousness or coma. Hours later, he was revived by followers who took him down from the cross and treated his wounds.

This concept, though widely rejected by theologians, has gained traction in certain, alternative history circles. And there's also in a book in the 1970s, there was one theory that Jesus went on to be a rebel leader at Massada. Now he would have been in his 70s by then. Masada, the hilltop fortress where Jewish zealots basically made a stand against Roman rule and then committed mass suicide and that Jesus committed suicide along with them. Masada was the site of a famous siege in 17th. siege in 17 CE, where nearly 1,000 Jewish zealots held off a Roman legion before choosing mass suicide over surrender. The theory that Jesus, having survived the cross, reemerged as a rebel leader there, is not widely

accepted by historians. But it reflects a larger theme in alternative theology, that Jesus' His life didn't end at crucifixion, but continued in secret. These stories push hard against beliefs, challenging the foundations of Christian faith. But for many who explore them, it's not about denial of the sacred. It's about filling the silence left by history and understanding the man behind the myth. Beyond the Middle East, Britain and India, there are even more remote and surprising destinations tied to the life and possible afterlife of Jesus of Nazareth. One other very out-there theory about the missing years after the crucifixion is this idea that Jesus got to Japan.

And there is a village in Japan that claims that Jesus lived there and died there and that his tomb is there. They even say that when he lived there, he was known as the long-nosed goblin. Shingo Village's Tomb of Christ is a real tourist attraction. A small burial mound is marked by a cross and a nearby museum. Local tradition claims Jesus married a Japanese woman, had children, and lived into his 80s, far from the Roman world. There are thousands of people who visit this town in Japan and there's even a gift center should you wish to visit.

While there is no historical evidence supporting the story, it reflects a broader global tendency, the desire to incorporate Jesus into regional folklore, to bring him closer to home. That same idea appears in another unexpected place, 19th century America. Let's not forget the Mormons who also thought that Jesus visited America just after the resurrection, and that he appeared to a people called the Nephites in America, and he established a church there. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jesus appeared to the ancient peoples of the Americas

shortly after his resurrection. In the Book of Mormon, he delivers sermons similar to those in the New Testament, founds a church, and departs, leaving a legacy among the Nephites, a lost Israelite tribe believed by Mormons to have settled in the new world. And I suppose this is part of the wish on the part of many Americans not to be excluded from the life story of Jesus.

So the idea that Jesus also got there. So there are a lot of intriguing theories around these missing years of Jesus. From Japan to the Americas, the spread of these stories reveals something universal. the need to see the divine, not as distant or abstract, but as physically present, walking the same lands, speaking the same languages, and sharing in local history. In each case, the missing years become more than a theological question. They become a canvas for cultural identity, and for some, sacred geography. Across two millennia, the missing years of Jesus have become one of the most

the most enduring blank spaces in religious history. In those silent decades between the temple and the ministry, believers, mystics, scholars, and storytellers have found space to imagine. And they've imagined widely. It's really not surprising that Christians have found it frustrating that there is this big gap in the life of Jesus. I mean, if you're writing a biography of somebody, you wouldn't kind of just stop at their childhood and then rejoin them age 30.

You know, it raises the obvious question, well, where was he? According to Christian doctrine, Jesus is both divine and human. But the Gospels offer almost nothing about the years in which that humanity was shaped. That absence has driven centuries of speculation, not just out of curiosity, but out of a need to understand who he really was. And this is somebody who is, you know, we're led to believe as of cosmic significance. He is half human, half God. He's the son of God.

Of course people want to know, where was he? What was happening? What was shaping his thoughts? What was shaping his outlook, his character? And yet we have nothing. There's just a big, yawning gap. So it's quite unsatisfactory. And it's not surprising that people have tried to.

to fill that gap. But I think it is very interesting this idea that, well, why shouldn't we look at what might have been the philosophical, the ideological influences on Jesus in his teens because he then pops up to apply it in his ministry. The missing years are still missing. But the stories that have tried to fill them, whether set in Pretty, Kashmir, Masada or Shingo, tell us just as much about the people telling them. They reveal a need to find Jesus, not only in Scripture, but in the wider world. But what's happened before, you know, what's molded the ideas that become his ministry, that become the ideas that we find in the New Testament, it's still a question that hasn't been

answered. Those years are still missing years. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, Please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network,

check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places, available now on your favorite, podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.