Exactly one of each pair

Two statements contradict only when they are about the same thing, in the same respect, both meant literally, and both actually asserted. So any reconciliation of the religions has to show that one of those four conditions fails. Tried on five conflicts between Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain teaching, the best reconciliations dissolve one, unsettle two, and fail on the last two, where the texts speak plainly and about everyone: whether a person lives again in another body, and whether the world had a beginning. On those two, logic says more than that the texts cannot both be right. Exactly one of each pair is.

John Hick, the most influential proponent of the view that the religions are equally valid paths to one divine reality, never denied that they make conflicting claims; he called the differences of belief between and within the traditions "legion", and argued that they are best seen as the different ways cultures have conceived and experienced one ultimate divine Reality.¹ Mark Heim argued instead that the religions' paths to salvation remain "incompatible, but equally valid", and other pluralists hold that different religions may reach different divine realities.¹ Hick's move changes the respect, since a claim about how the Real appears to one culture does not conflict with a claim about how it appears to another. Heim's changes the subject, since traditions bound for different destinations need not describe the same one. Hick's move dissolves the conflict between a personal God and an impersonal absolute, both of which can be true of different appearances. The price is that each tradition becomes a description of how the Real looks from somewhere, which is not how most of the texts present themselves.

The self is harder than it looks. The Bhagavad Gita says the soul "is without birth, eternal, immortal, and ageless."² In a Pali discourse a wanderer asks the Buddha whether there is a self, and then whether there is no self, and the Buddha stays silent both times.³ He later tells Ananda that answering "there is a self" would side with the eternalists and, as Ananda agrees, would not fit the knowledge that "all phenomena are not-self", while answering "there is no self" would side with the annihilationists and leave the questioner more bewildered.³ The silence leaves a reconciler room, but the reasons lean against an eternal self. The Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on the Buddha agrees with interpreters who say he never categorically denied a self beyond the psychophysical elements, while denying that any of those elements is a self; it also records the objection that all of classical Indian philosophy, Buddhist and orthodox alike, understood him to have denied the self outright.⁴

The crucifixion is a claim about one man on one day. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the resurrection "a real event, with manifestations that were historically verified", quotes Paul's "Christ died for our sins", and says it is "impossible not to acknowledge it as an historical fact."⁵ That closes the route of metaphor from inside the Church. The Quran, in Mustafa Khattab's translation of 4:157, says of those who boasted of killing Jesus that "they neither killed nor crucified him" and that "it was only made to appear so."⁶ According to most classical Muslim commentators, the verse teaches that Jesus did not die, and that another man was given his appearance and crucified in his place.⁷ On that reading the two texts give contradictory answers to whether Jesus died on the cross.

Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that the verse denies only that the Jews killed Jesus and that the Quran accepts his death, pointing to a verse, traditionally applied to the battle of Badr, that tells believers "You did not kill them" and then "God killed them."⁷ Mahmoud Ayoub had argued on theological grounds that the Quran does not deny the death.⁷ Their reading keeps both texts literal and reconciles them on the death itself, since a man can die on a cross while those who claim the killing are wrong about who caused it. It does not reach the Catechism's "for our sins". It is the strongest kind of reconciliation, because it asks neither side to call its words a metaphor. It is also a minority reading; Reynolds writes that most classical commentators and most critical scholars take the verse to deny the death, calls that teaching "a sort of shibboleth of orthodoxy", and describes the phrase at issue as ambiguous, with translators divided.⁷ Hick wrote that disagreements of this kind "could only properly be settled by the weight of historical evidence", and that the events are usually too remote, and the evidence too slight and uncertain, for them to be settled definitively.⁸

The self and the crucifixion have the same shape. Most of the classical readers saw a contradiction, and a modern reading removes it.

Rebirth has no such ambiguity. The Catechism says that when "the single course of our earthly life" is completed, "we shall not return to other earthly lives", quoting "It is appointed for men to die once", and adds: "There is no 'reincarnation' after death."⁹ The Gita says that "at the time of death, the soul casts off its worn-out body and enters a new one."¹⁰ Heim's reconciliation would need the Catechism to speak only of Christians and the Gita only of Hindus, and one speaks of "men" while the other speaks of the soul as such. "No one returns to another earthly life" and "some souls enter new bodies" are contradictories, so if one is false the other is true. The larger pictures behind them, one life and then judgment against a cycle of births governed by karma, could both be false; those two sentences cannot.

The beginning of the world is the same. The Catechism says that "nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator", and that "the world began when God's word drew it out of nothingness", in "the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun."¹¹ The Jain monk Hemacandra wrote in the twelfth century that "the universe is without beginning and without end", and that "it was made by no one and is supported by no one"; JAINpedia counts the absence of a creator god and a universe that never originated among Jain cosmology's chief principles.¹² Either the world began or it did not, and either something made it or nothing did. The Catechism's "nothing exists" leaves no second, uncreated universe for the Jain sentence to be about.

What separates the pairs that survive from the rest is wording and scope more than subject. Explicit and reticent texts alike knew their rivals: the Catechism puts "reincarnation" in quotation marks to deny it, and the Buddha names the eternalists while declining to join them. The difference is whether a text chose to assert, and about whom.

A contradiction of this kind says that one side is wrong, and does not say which. It settles one sentence at a time and says nothing about the rest of either tradition. Nor does it let anyone hold that both sides are wrong, including someone who thinks every religion false. A materialist agrees with the Catechism that there is no reincarnation, and with Hemacandra that no one made the world.