Cedar Rapids author Dale Kueter’s new book, ‘Jesus: The Untold Years’ fills in the missing pieces

Cedar Rapids author Dale Kueter knows a thing or two about what makes a good story.

After working for newspapers for 41 years, including 34 at The Gazette, Kueter turned his attention to writing books. His fifth book, “Jesus: The Untold Years,” is available now.

“Most of the time newspaper reporters write about people,” Kueter explained in a recent interview. “I got to thinking. What greater person to write about than Jesus?”

For Kueter, it was fun to picture what life may have been like for Jesus when he was growing up. While the New Testament provides some highlights, “there’s about 30 years where he’s a mystery.”

“There’s so much of his life we know nothing about. So I decided — as a number of others have done — to use my imagination and fill in the blanks.”

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Kueter had the chance to ponder large questions while writing the book, such as when did Jesus first sense his divinity, as well as lighter points, like if he ever scraped his knee or had a dog.

“I was more interested in the years that we don’t know about him, what we don’t know about him, imagining what that might be: his boyhood friends, his education, what was he like as a teenager.”

Kueter was able to draw on his personal knowledge of the Bible and his own faith when writing the book, and he also conducted a good deal of research, including reading several books and articles, as well as having a conversation with Dr. Amanda Osheim, a theologian and professor of practical theology at Loras College.

A trip to the Holy Land in 1999 also proved to be inspirational and transformative.

“If you ever have a chance to go to the holy land, do it,” Kueter said. “That whole experience of being where Jesus grew up and stepping on the same soil that he stepped on …. That had a tremendous effect on my faith.”

This trip “propelled” Kueter to “someday take up and try to fill in the blanks” regarding Jesus’s young life.

“Jesus: The Untold Years” is Kueter’s third novel. He also has published two books on non-fiction, including “The Smell of the Soil” about his own boyhood growing up on a farm in rural Jackson County.

“The greatest pleasure that I could get from any reader of “Jesus: The Untold Years,” … is for people to imagine along on their own. And say: ‘well, I don’t agree with him here, when he says this I don’t think it might have been that way. I think it was something else.’ For readers to draw their own conclusions on what (Jesus) may have done.”