The Rev Professor Charles Moule

Matthew Parris writes: Charlie Moule's tremendous scholarship needs no testimony but the legend of his kindness should also live on (obituary, Oct 5 ). Like many at Clare College, Cambridge, in the 1960s and 1970s, I have a recollection of a diminutive don, unbelievably generous with his time, whose openness to all was famous and whose patient willingness to talk over doubts, beliefs and difficulties with any undergraduate seemed unlimited. I discussed with him my own religious doubts and was struck by an extraordinary combination of rigour with mercy, tolerance with conviction. Never intellectually sloppy, he was as exacting as he was gentle.

Decades later, as a journalist whose unbelief was plain, I wrote Charlie a note expressing curiosity about the New Testament advice that “it needs must be” that evils occurred, yet evil-doers were damned nonetheless. I received in reply a long, careful, minutely supported exposition of how these phrases had arrived in this form in the English language, and what might originally have been meant.

The Rev Christopher Leffler writes: As a very new undergraduate in 1954 I went to a lunchtime meeting of the Church Missionary Society Association in Professor Moule's rooms. Nervously I knocked and undergraduate voices welcomed me in. It was not until the end when they thanked the great man for use of his rooms that I discovered that he had spent the meeting eating his sandwiches on the floor behind the sofa while the undergraduate officers and speaker had his best chairs. No wonder he was so loved as well as respected.

I still have my notes of his lectures, and value them.

The Ven Gerald Phizackerley writes: When I was a parish priest in the Norwich Diocese in the 1960s, Bishop Launcelot Fleming asked me to supervise the training of a group of young clergy. Feeling the need of some expert theological input, I called on Professor Charlie Moule in his rooms at Clare College, Cambridge. I boldly asked if he would consider coming over to King's Lynn to be the theological adviser to my little group. He readily agreed.

He travelled to Gaywood, King's Lynn, regularly. Casually dressed, he entered Gaywood Rectory looking as if he had just taken off his bicycle clips. He wore his massive scholarship with equal ease. His influence — as a humble Christian of transparent sincerity, who combined quiet charm with profound insight — must have lived on. Two of that group subsequently became diocesan bishops, and the others fulfilled equally significant ministries.