Legend has it that Abraham, the patriarch, held theological debates with King Nimrod. Josephus Flavius wrote about theological debates between Jews and non-Jews in Alexandria and Rome. During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, public debates between Jews and Christians were held on numerous occasions. Let us briefly examine one such debate, known as the "Dispute of Nachmanides."
Nachmanides was one of the greatest Jewish scholars, a philosopher, astronomer, physician, Talmudist, commentator on the Holy Scriptures, and Kabbalist.
In 1263, at the initiative of the King of Spain, a debate between Nachmanides and a Dominican monk, Pablo Christiano, a baptized Jew, took place in Barcelona. The text of the debates reveals that the dispute concerned the foundations of the Christian and Jewish faiths and addressed the question of the coming of the Messiah in two aspects: whether he has already come, as Christians believe, or is yet to come, as Jews believe. Is the Messiah God Himself or merely a man born of a husband and wife?
The debate lasted several days, and Nachmanides emerged victorious.
Even the king, who had initiated the debate, hoping for the triumph of his religion over the Jewish one, acknowledged Nachmanides' victory, telling Nachmanides: "Let the debate be suspended, for I have never seen a single person who was wrong and yet argued as well as you have."
A detailed account of this debate in Russian can be found in the book by the rabbi and remarkable translator B. Haskelevich, "The Nachmanides Debate," published by HAMA, New York - Tel Aviv, 1982.