Medieval polemical argumentation and literature must be approached from a number of perspectives. These include: the issues under debate, the grounds of argumentation, and the literary format in which the polemical case is made. Our cursory look at early Christian polemics focused on the grounds of that anti-Jewish argumentation; the coming chapters will be organized in terms of key issues in the Christian–Jewish debate; at the close of this study, we shall devote some attention to the literary formats chosen by our Jewish authors. Prior to embarking on the analysis of key issues in dispute, we must pause to ask whether our Jewish authors were sensitive to the foundations upon which Christian argumentation was based and whether they chose to challenge any of those foundations.

Our brief review of the foundations of Christian anti-Jewish polemic has suggested that the central mode of argumentation from the Christian side involved citation of biblical verses that Jesus and his followers were purported to have fulfilled. We have seen that, in the Gospels themselves, the miracles performed by and on behalf of Jesus played a key role in the presentation of Christian claims to Jesus' Jewish contemporaries. However, with the passage of time, the immediacy of these miracles was lost, at least for the purposes of convincing Jews, whose ancestors had seemingly rejected these wonders. Thus, the predictions of Israel's prophets – likewise central to Gospel argumentation – came to dominate the Christian case as made to Jews.