In this paper I shall be applying a modern-day issue to ancient texts. My intention is to illuminate understanding of the ancient texts and to try to stimulate dialogue between the Bible and a major concern of today. I do not intend to suggest that the authors of these texts had any environmental awareness in the terms we might use nowadays. However I find outlooks and presuppositions in their thought that can be illuminating for our own concerns and even guide us in attitudes we might adopt towards our environment.

If we are frank, we have no idea whether there was a pre-Marcan Gospel, in the sense of a continuous written account of Jesus. It is widely believed that there was a continuous Passion narrative before Mark, and it is often thought that there were some collections of pericopae, like the controversy stories in 2.1–3.6; but denials that there was a continuous story, in some sense like our Mark, are as weakly supported as assertions of the same. It could be that Friedrich Schleiermacher was right, and that certain διηγ⋯σεις existed before Mark, to which Luke had access. We might think it rather singular that so elaborate a work as Mark should appear de novo, like Athena from the head of Zeus. But we have no evidence to take us beyond conjecture.

In Exodus 3, 14 a concept of the God of Israel is hinted at, and the hint is taken up by Moses Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed and developed in a way that should hold our metaphysical gaze. In particular, on the basis of the Great Tautology Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh contained in that verse, he presents an account of God in terms of a distinctive application of the categories of agent and act, and I shall follow Maimonides through the crucial moves he makes in his application of those categories to God. Yet the Maimonidean system presents us with reasons for being suspicious of the application of any categories at all to God, and my approach to Maimonides' discussion of the Great Tautology will be by way of a consideration of those reasons, all of which relate to the most famous feature of the Guide of the Perplexed, the unremitting application of the via negativa. There are large problems concerning the correct way to understand Maimonides' use of that via. But we cannot afford here to be deterred from attending to that aspect of his system, for he uses it in his discussion of the Great Tautology. Indeed he has barely started his journey along the Via Negativa when he is confronted by the concept of divine existence and has to decide on an appropriate response. Hence in our investigation of Maimonides' concept of divine existence, we must take into account the way in which his apophatic route determines his perspective.

Few aspects of Paul's teaching have proved more controversial in recent times than his injunction that women should neither speak (lalein) nor teach (didaskein) in church assemblies (1 Cor. 14.34–35; 1 Tim. 2.11–12). To those seeking to promote the ministry of women in the church, the apostle's words appear as a personal expression of opinion founded on patriarchal prejudice, on rabbinic conservatism or on purely local considerations of strategy, motives which are of little more than documentary interest in the current debate. To proponents of the principle of male leadership, on the other hand, Paul's instruction forms part of a normative, enduring evangelical tradition which is often assumed to bear not only on the order of the church but on the order of creation itself. In these circumstances it is instructive to examine Calvin's treatment of the subject as found not only in his major dogmatic work, The Institute of the Christian Religion, but at various places in his sermons and commentaries. Our purpose here is not to make Calvin the arbiter of what, in his own day, was a highly marginal question – outside of court and literary circles, equality of the sexes was not a serious Renaissance concern – but rather to understand how he interpreted Paul's teaching in the context of a creation which God was already renewing and of a church where all were already made one in Christ.

In 1918, on the very day the First World War ended, Karl Barth (1886–1968) wrote of doing theology with the Bible in one hand and the newspapers in the other. The scriptures and the daily papers converge in presenting one real, if highly unpleasant, feature of our human existence: hatred.