A rabbi, an imam and a priest sat down to discuss the most sensitive parts of their sacred scriptures, the verses that offend or anger other faiths.
But instead of the Catholic criticising Koran quotes or the Jew complaining about a Gospel, each took objectionable passages from his own holy book and tried to explain them to the others.
"Les Versets douloureux" (The Painful Verses), the result of their work, is an unusual book that aims to move interfaith dialogue beyond polite meetings to discuss issues that create tensions among Christians, Muslims and Jews.
Rabbi David Meyer, the driving force behind the project, said his frustration with routine interfaith meetings that avoided tough issues prompted him to seek a different kind of dialogue with Sohaib Bencheikh and Rev Yves Simoens SJ.
"For a real dialogue, we have to have the courage to confront difficult things," the rabbi of the International Jewish Center in Brussels said at a presentation of the French-language book in Paris on Thursday.
The book marked a new approach in interfaith dialogue. While religious leaders have been meeting for decades, an upswing in contacts in recent years reflects a feeling they need to work even more closely to foster better understanding.
Bensheikh, head of the Higher Institute of Islamic Sciences in Marseille, stressed the book was "not a dialogue between institutions. It's the work of three believers, that's all."
DON'T STOP AT BANALITIES
Meyer said he got the idea when members of his congregation asked how he could dialogue with Muslims when they had passages hostile to Jews in the Koran. "I knew I could find passages in Jewish texts that would make them shudder," he said.
Simoens, professor of scripture at the Centre Sevres faculty of philosophy and Catholic theology in Paris, said there was a growing realisation among religions "that the dialogue should be true and not stop just at banalities".
One of Islam's "painful verses", Bencheikh said, was the hadith "Kill him who changes his religion". This saying of the Prophet Mohammed is used to outlaw apostasy in some Muslim states and, in a very few, to threaten ex-Muslims with death.
