Gaps in narratives arouse the curiosity of readers. Those perusing the Gospels, for example, may wonder: what happened to Jesus after the stories of his infancy? What did he do for a good part of his adolescent and young adult life? The lacuna in the canonical Gospels has provoked fertile imaginations to create stories about the so-called “hidden life” of Jesus, with some of the more fantastic ones having been preserved in the apocryphal gospels that were widely circulated up until the medieval period. – Author (first paragraph)