Profeyt Duran and Ibn Shaprut’s Jesus: A Marginal Jew

Profiat Duran (Isaac ben Moses ha-Levy) is arguably one of the better known and most impressive Jewish polemicists of the Late Middle Ages. In his magisterial Kelimmath ha-Goyim Duran essentially contends that Jesus and his first followers were “marginal Jews” and that it was those who followed them misunderstood Jesus and made him into a divine being. This argument has much earlier precedents, both in pagan, Jewish, and Muslim polemical tradition, yet Duran makes a more sustained effort to tie these elements and observations into a coherent theory. Likewise, his contemporary Shem Tov Ibn Shaprut reasons in Even Bohan that Jesus’ teaching was (to some extend at least) in line with the Jewish sages. Both portray the “historical Jesus” as misguided, yet still recognisably Jewish figure, which is polemically expedient, yet at the same time may represent an actual view of how Christianity has been understood to come about. In doing so they provide a snapshot of how Christianity was perceived by educated Jews at the end of the 14th century in Iberia.