Excellent question, and I’ve actually been discussing this lately. So I will start from the beginning and work towards modern views.
First, we have to start with Paul. Paul was a Pharisee, and obviously, he thought Jesus was the messiah. This isn’t surprising as Jesus wasn’t the first person to be considered the Messiah. During the second Jewish Revolt, for instance, Rabbi Akiva regarded Simon bar Kokhba as the messiah. Josephus tells us of a variety of figures who were seen as the messiah, but failed.
Next, we can move to the author of Matthew. I moved here simply because the author (most scholars assume he was Jewish) tells us that some Jews were saying that the body of Jesus was stolen from the tomb by his followers. What we are seeing here is an early polemic against the new Christian movement. It doesn’t necessarily say much about what Jews thought about Jesus, but that they thought the movement had issues and that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.
So in all, the Bible doesn’t really tell us much, but I wanted to include it in order to show that Jesus was initially recognized as a Jew.
Our first non-Biblical Jewish source on Jesus is Josephus. He writes twice about Jesus in the Antiquities of the Jews, and really just portrays him as one more failed messiah. It’s a sterile treatment.
From there, we can jump to rabbinic literature. However, we have to be careful. The great Jewish scholar, Joseph Klausner, argued that the very few possible references to Jesus in the Talmud weren’t of any historical worth, as they just demonstrated the polemic against a hated party.
John P Meier, in The Marginal Jew, Volume 1, looks over these possible references. What he points out is that when it comes to the Mishna, Tosefta, and Talmud (early Rabbinic texts), it’s debated whether any even have a single line that references Jesus.
However, Klausner points to an early rabbinic tradition that speaks of a person named Ben Pandera who impregnated a Jewish maiden. We know from Origen that the second-century pagan polemicist Celsus also refers to this story in regard to Jesus, and states he heard it from a Jew. Basically, Celsus used the story as evidence that Mary wasn’t a virgin but slept with or was possibly raped by a Roman soldier.
Another text that is often cited as a reference to Jesus is in the Babylonian Talmud’s tractate Sanhedrin 43a. Here, a Jesus is mentioned who is hanged on the eve of Passover. There, Jesus is described as a magician who was leading Israel astray. This may refer to Jesus, and really is just a text that is reacting to the Gospels.
If these two passages do refer to Jesus, then we can see that the view of Jesus ended up being negative, at least in part. Meier isn’t convinced that these passages refer to Jesus though. Part of his argument is that early rabbinic Judaism simply didn’t care about Jesus because they had other matters on their mind. They were trying to form a new sect of Judaism and come to terms with the fact that the Temple was gone.
Now there is a text called Toledot Yeshu. It’s definitely Jewish polemic against Christianity and Jesus. It probably wasn’t fully formed until the Middle Ages, and probably wasn’t composed until the 10th century. The text also isn’t canonical. Robert Van Voorst, in Jesus Outside the New Testament, called the Toledot polemic that has run wild. As Meier points out, some of the stories probably go back as far as Celsus, but the Toledot is a work from the 10th century that was largely ignored by Jewish scholars. Basically, it was a popular work.
The Toledot tells us two things really. First, there was a negative view of Jesus. He’s said to be an illegitimate child, a womanizer, a heretic, a magician, and at the end, he died a shameful death. At the same time, it shows that Jesus was also seen as someone who was witty and had wisdom. He was an exceptional person, but went down the wrong path.
One of the most famous Jewish scholars from the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, doesn’t treat Jesus all too well. He accepts that Jesus was a Jew (even though he claims his father was a gentile). His problem with Jesus is that he believed Jesus was a false teacher. A person who tried to convince the Jews he was the messiah. Maimonides seems to be accusing Jesus of running a conspiracy to destroy the Jewish people and to wipe out the religion by interpreting the Torah in a way that leads to their total annulment, abolition of the commandments, and a violation of the prohibitions. He praises the sages for uncovering this plot and finding a suitable punishment for Jesus.
Up until more of the recent period, the Jewish view has been rather negative. John Dominic Crossan, in Who Killed Jesus, gives us a good reason why. When the polemic between Jews and Christians was simply between them, there was no real problem. It was a back-and-forth exchange. But as Christians and Jews moved further and further apart, and Christians ended up gaining power, that polemic ended up being dangerous. And with that, we have the rise of anti-semitism. The Toledot Yeshu and Maimonides were born of that environment.
As anti-Semitism rose, and persecution that followed led to things such as a mockery of Jesus, because if the movement he started is responsible for the persecution, he couldn’t have been any good.
That has changed now. In 1905, Clyde Weber Votaw wrote an article titled The Modern Jewish View of Jesus. He goes over the main Jewish views of Jesus and finds that they see him as a Jew who was misguided. Votaw, in his conclusion, isn’t happy with that and comments on how someday they will basically see the truth.
Since then though, a better understanding between Jewish scholars and Christian scholars has emerged, partially because scholars like Geza Vermes and E.P. Sanders have done such great work showing what Judaism was in the first century. There are other scholars, such as Rabbi Harvey Falk, in his book Jesus the Pharisee, who argue that Jesus was probably a Pharisee and that his views were in line with what first became Rabbinic Judaism.
So it went from people like Paul supporting him as a messiah, to Josephus just seeing him as one more messianic claimant. To some polemic but nothing really official, as Jews simply didn’t care, to a response to the anti-semitism that rose up, and it was some very negative views. To now, an understanding that Jesus was Jewish, possibly a Pharisee, and like many other so-called messiahs at that time, was mistaken.