Typically, Jews are allowed to break the law in order to save a life; here Rabbi Ishmael teaches that one should rather die than traffic with minim.)
Rabbi Eliezer recalls that this was indeed the case, he had met Jacob of the town of Sakhnin in the streets of Sepphoris who spoke to him a word of minuth in the name of Yeshu ben Pandera, which had pleased him.
Avodah Zarah, 16b-17a in the Babylonian Talmud essentially repeats the account of Chullin 2:24 about Rabbi Eliezer and adds additional material.
It tells that Jacob quoted Deuteronomy 23:19: "You shall not bring the fee of a whore or the price of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in fulfillment of any vow."
[3] Recently, some scholars have argued that the references to Jesus in the Talmud provide a more complex view of early Rabbinic-Christian interactions.
The sometimes blurry boundary between the Rabbis and early Christians provided an important site for distinguishing between legitimate debate and heresy.
[4][5] Jeffrey Rubenstein has argued that the accounts in Chullin and Avodah Zarah reveal an ambivalent relationship between rabbis and Christianity.
In his view the tosefta account reveals that at least some Jews believed Christians were true healers, but that the rabbis saw this belief as a major threat.
Boyarin has suggested that this was the Jewish version of the Br'er Rabbit approach to domination, which he contrasts to the strategy of many early Christians, who proclaim their beliefs in spite of the consequences (i.e. martyrdom).
[4] R. Travers Herford used a translation of the passages which named Jacob's hometown as Sama in the first account strictly speaking the name of a town nine miles away from Sakhnin (the account is mentioned in corresponding passages of the Jerusalem Talmud (Avodah Zarah 2:2 IV.I), and Babylonian Talmud (Avodah Zarah 27b) where his home town is Sama in the former but Sakhnin (Aramaic Shekhania) in the latter).