Historically, some Jewish writers and scholars have considered Jesus as the most damaging "false prophet," and traditional views of Jesus have been mostly negative, though influential Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages including Judah Halevi and Maimonides viewed Jesus as an important preparatory figure for a future universal ethical monotheism of the Messianic Age. Some modern Jewish thinkers starting in the 18th century with the Orthodox Jacob Emden and the reformer Moses Mendelssohn have sympathetically speculated that the historical Jesus may have been closer to Judaism than either the Gospels or traditional Jewish accounts would indicate, a view that is still espoused by some.