Note: This was in the queue before I realized that it was falling on General Conference weekend, so it’s not in response to anything said over the pulpit. 

I recently read an account of the three great medieval Jewish-Catholic disputations (Judaism on Trial, McCoby). These were debates arranged by the Christian authorities where the top rabbinical scholars were pitted against typically former Jewish, now Christian theology scholars. They were conducted under some duress by the Jewish community, who knew that a misplaced phrase could lead to a pogrom or expulsion for their community, and were constantly trying to thread the needle by defending their faith, which by definition rejects fundamental tenets of the Christian faith, without saying something that could be seen as offensive to Christian beliefs.

The stakes of these debates made them thrilling even if the back-and-forth about what a particular line in the Talmud meant could get a little dry. In most cases implied parameters were set up as to where the Jewish debaters could and could not go, and the arguments were about very specific points of dispute (of the three, the Barcelona disputation was considered the freest and fairest, as the Jewish disputant was a friend and confidante of the king, who seemed to sincerely hold that a genuine, free “marketplace of ideas” approach would naturally prove the superiority of Christianity). 

As an example, at the Disputation of Paris the Church was deciding whether to censure or burn the Talmud for heresy because according to some it disparaged Jesus Christ. Whether it did in fact do so turned on whether the Jesus mentioned in the Talmud is the Christian Jesus, so among other arguments the rabbis dryly made the point that “not every Louise in France is King.”  Because of this needle-threading, there was a fascinating tactic where the rabbis would be quoting early Church fathers like Jerome to make their point in the original Latin while the Christian disputants would be quoting Midrash from the Talmud to make theirs. While sometimes the discourse was very legalistic and formal, in other moments it was more playground smack-down between the individuals involved while the king or Pope (depending on the disputation) sat in the background.

For example, there was one particularly–I beg your pardon but it really is the best word for this–ballsey moment in the Jewish disputant’s opening statement at the Paris disputation.

But we will die rather than give up the Talmud, which is the apple of our eye. Even if you should decide to burn the Talmud in France, it will continue to be studied in the rest of the world, for we Jews are dispersed throughout the world. Our bodies, but not our souls, are in your hands. 

Of course, nowadays we are more ecumenical (I have a hard time seeing anybody set up a formal debate between Elder Bednar and Cardinal Dolan on infant baptism), so this kind of formal religious back-and-forth generally has been relegated to YouTube influencers and such, and I think that’s the way it should be for a number of reasons.  

As I have noted before, I enjoy a good intellectual back-and-forth, and I think it’s important for sides to flesh out their perspectives, with iron sharpening iron and all that, but nobody is convinced by these (at least from any single video, the inability or unwillingness for a faith to defend itself is a problem) one way or the other. Plus we have something to learn from one of the rabbis in the disputes (I forget which one) who tried to come to a sort of “agree to disagree” position where both faiths are based on fundamental priors that are not constructible or deconstructable through reasoning and debate, and I think that’s where most people are. We have formalized that epistemological approach in our own Church, where testimony is based on sense experience and not logical proofs (which isn’t to say that logic can’t attack a faith, at some point I don’t care if the spirit told you there is a Loch Ness monster if there has never been any evidence for it that we would expect given the parameters of the claim). 

So while these more casual debates are fun, there have been religious debates where the stakes were much, much higher than influencer clicks. In addition to the Jewish-Catholic medieval disputations, a few that I can think of: 

• The Diet of Worms that marked the formal split between Lutheranism and Catholicism (Martin Luther’s famous “here I stand” moment)
• Brigham Young’s debate with Sidney Rigdon over the succession to Joseph Smith
• Council of Nicea that defined post-Apostolic Christian doctrine and led to various schisms
• Peter before the Sanhedrin
• Paul before the Sanhedrin 
• Hampton Court Conference that led to the King James Bible
• The religious debates of Akbar the Great. 

On one hand the stakes are quite a bit lower now because, for some cases, we don’t burn or stone people for heterodoxy anymore, which is, it goes without saying, a good thing. On the other hand I think some of the lower stakes are a simple function of the fact that religion in general just means less in society today. So in a sense I look back with a certain interest in the time when empires waited with baited breath on the outcome of a religious dispute, but by the same token I recognize that there are objectively good social developments that have led us to the place to where our lives do not hinge on the outcomes of those religious debates. 

That being said, given my belief that we’re just better at things now through better education and larger numbers, I suspect that even the casual apologists on YouTube would probably be able to hold their ground with the great disputants of yesteryear. If we were to grab one of the top Yeshiva students in the world today and stack them against the best Christian apologists the sophistication and quality of the argument would be as good if not better, it’s just that hardly anybody would take the time to listen or care.