Middle Ages

The Middle Ages form a central historical layer in Shmuel Ash’s study of Jewish writing about Jesus: a record of arguments shaped by religious difference, political vulnerability, and changing interpretive choices. Medieval authors challenged Christian doctrine in sharply varied ways, but the narrative also emphasizes dissent within Jewish responses and the conspicuous silence surrounding Judas Iscariot.

Polemic and the transmission of texts

By around the middle of the ninth century, or possibly earlier, an anonymous Jewish writer in a Muslim country composed an Arabic work ridiculing Christianity. Known as Qissat muyadalat al-Usqut, or The Book of Nestor the Priest, it presents a priest who converts to Judaism and then explains to Christians why their faith is false. The account describes its author as knowledgeable about Christian scripture and later Christian interpretations.

Jewish readers translated the work from Arabic into Hebrew during the Middle Ages. It circulated in different versions, sometimes with Greek and Latin glosses, and versions apparently traveled from Sefarad to Ashkenaz and Byzantium. Its aims included exposing contradictions in the Gospels, rejecting the Trinity, and denying Jesus’s divinity. Its methods were not consistent: it could portray Jesus as a devout Jew who never intended to found a new religion, while also using degrading claims about his birth and mocking his death on the cross. The work thus combines theological argument with polemical attack rather than offering a single, stable account of Jesus.

Disputation and competing interpretations

Medieval Jewish responses were not uniformly scornful. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen objected to degrading stories about Jesus as foolish words that an educated person would be ashamed to utter, even as his own book questioned the validity of the New Testament. In The Kuzari, the twelfth-century Rabbi Yehuda ha-Levi gives a Christian sage a coherent account of Jesus’s life and Christian doctrine; the Khazar king remains unconvinced because the claims seem illogical, but the narrative does not distort or ridicule the account.

Maimonides offers another combination of criticism and historical distinction. He calls Jesus a false prophet, yet regards Christianity as a step in humanity’s movement from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel. In his Letter to the Jews of Yemen, he separates Jesus from what his disciples and later legends said and did in his name, while also stating that Jewish sages of Jesus’s time apparently took part in his death.

In Christian Provence, Rabbi David Qimhi’s Book of the Covenant engages arguments circulating among Christians about whether Jesus was divine in bodily form or spirit without a body. Qimhi ridicules the claim that Jesus could have been a nonphysical being in a human mother’s womb and argues that, without a real body, Jesus could not have died on the cross. His polemic turns a theological dispute into an argument about the implications of embodiment.

Public controversy under unequal stakes

The narrative also recalls the forced public disputation involving Ramban, Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, and the convert Pablo Cristiani, also known as Friar Paul. Ordered by King James I of Aragon, the debate lasted four consecutive days. Its apparent intellectual terms concealed an unequal danger: Jews could suffer violence whether the Christian or Jewish side was judged to have won. Cristiani cited the Talmud to claim that it contained attacks on Christianity as well as indications that Christianity was true and Jesus was the Messiah. Ramban later presented the encounter as a victory, though the account suggests that neither side clearly prevailed—and that victory itself could be dangerous for him.

This episode makes the conditions of medieval religious argument part of its meaning. The debate was not simply an exchange of doctrines: the Jewish participant faced consequences whichever way the judgment went. The novel’s account therefore places polemical texts and public disputation within a history of constrained speech, in which argument unfolded under the threat of communal punishment.

Jesus, Judas, and the limits of the record

In The Book of the Covenant, Qimhi’s discussion of Jesus’s body and death is one example of how medieval polemic could focus on the supernatural claims surrounding Jesus. Shmuel notices a broader pattern across the writings he studies: Jewish authors often contest miracles, divine status, and accounts of birth and death without addressing the spiritual or moral force of Jesus’s message. He is especially struck by the absence of Judas Iscariot. In his reading, that silence matters because Judas’s role is connected to the crucifixion and, consequently, to the emergence of Christianity.

The same silence recurs in Shmuel’s wider account of Jewish writing. Even authors who describe Jesus as Jewish, criticize the priestly class, or accuse him of sorcery leave Judas unmentioned. Shmuel suggests that this avoidance may reflect shame or fear of revisiting a figure burdened by generations of hatred. The medieval record consequently appears not only as an archive of arguments about Jesus, but also as a record shaped by omission: what writers chose not to discuss becomes part of the history they transmit.

Reading history in the present

These medieval materials reach the reader through Shmuel’s research and his conversations with Gershom Wald. Their placement within his inquiry makes them more than background history: they become evidence in an ongoing effort to distinguish Jesus from later Christian interpretations and to understand the different meanings assigned to Judas. Wald’s own skepticism toward religious and political programs of redemption sharpens the contrast between theological promises and histories of persecution, while Shmuel’s notes attend to the interpretive consequences of silence.

The period is therefore presented as neither a single tradition nor a simple progression from hostility to understanding. Its texts range from ridicule and logical refutation to careful exposition and internal criticism. Their variety, and their silences, show how interpretations of Jesus were shaped by theological disputes as well as by the social risks under which Jewish writers lived.