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Saturday, June 01, 2013

Hagel mixes business and memories in Asia trip - Yahoo! News

Hagel mixes business and memories in Asia trip - Yahoo! News:
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Hagel mixes business and memories in Asia trip

By LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press – 1 hr 36 mins ago
SINGAPORE (AP) — Forty-five years ago, as the Vietnam war raged on, Army Spc. Chuck Hagel andNguyen Tan Dung were on opposite sides of combat serving in the Mekong Delta — both wounded more than once as they battled for their countries.
This weekend the two men — now America's defense secretary and Vietnam's prime minister — met at a formal dinner at the start of an international security conference here, working to help build America's growing military partnership with Vietnam.
Hagel's first trip to Asia as Pentagon chief has been a bit of a walk down memory lane for the former infantry soldier.
While Hagel and Dung knew of each other's service in Vietnam, they had never met. So when they spoke on the sidelines of the dinner, they had the chance to exchange war stories.
Back in 1968, Hagel was a specialist in the 2nd Battalion of the 47th Infantry Regiment, fighting in the Mekong Delta. Dung, who joined the Viet Cong around 1961 when he would have been about 12, and served as a corpsman, then later led a surgery unit reportedly operating in the Delta's U Minh forest.
According to defense officials, the two men talked briefly about their time at war and the fact that both had bled for their countries. Hung invited Hagel to visit Vietnam, and the secretary said he looks forward to going, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the private meeting.
Hagel also recalled family war history during a private meeting Saturday with Philippines Secretary of National Defense Voltaire Gazmin. According to defense officials, Hagel noted that his father served in that country during WWII with the 13th Army Air Corps. Officials said Hagel told Gazmin that during a visit to the Philippines in the 1980s, he was surprised to see a photo of his father in a foxhole on display in an exhibit — the same photo that had hung in the Hagel family home.
The secretary's first stop on this Asia trip was in Hawaii, where he recalled going on leave with his brother Tom during the middle of their Vietnam war tour. Hagel ate at the same — although updated — restaurant in Honolulu during this trip as he had back in July 1968, when he and Tom got together at the Halekulani Hotel with their mother and other family members for the weeklong R&R.
To secure the memory, Hagel stood for a photo at the same large tree that his family had posed in front of during that reunion.

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Bart D. Ehrman: Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters

Bart D. Ehrman: Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters:
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Bart D. Ehrman

Author, 'Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are'
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Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters

Posted: 03/25/11 09:38 PM ET
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Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors -- a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that -- that the Bible actually contains lies?
Most people wouldn't put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.
Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books "pseudepigrapha."
You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It's the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means "writing that is inscribed with a lie."
And that's what such writings are. Whoever wrote the New Testament book of 2 Peter claimed to be Peter. But scholars everywhere -- except for our friends among the fundamentalists -- will tell you that there is no way on God's green earth that Peter wrote the book. Someone else wrote it claiming to be Peter. Scholars may also tell you that it was an acceptable practice in the ancient world for someone to write a book in the name of someone else. But that is where they are wrong. If you look at what ancient people actually said about the practice, you'll see that they invariably called it lying and condemned it as a deceitful practice, even in Christian circles. 2 Peter was finally accepted into the New Testament because the church fathers, centuries later, were convinced that Peter wrote it. But he didn't. Someone else did. And that someone else lied about his identity.
The same is true of many of the letters allegedly written by Paul. Most scholars will tell you that whereas seven of the 13 letters that go under Paul's name are his, the other six are not. Their authors merely claimed to be Paul. In the ancient world, books like that were labeled as pseudoi -- lies.
This may all seem like a bit of antiquarian curiosity, especially for people whose lives don't depend on the Bible or even people of faith for whom biblical matters are a peripheral interest at best. But in fact, it matters sometimes. Whoever wrote the book of 1 Timothy claimed to be Paul. But he was lying about that -- he was someone else living after Paul had died. In his book, the author of 1 Timothy used Paul's name and authority to address a problem that he saw in the church. Women were speaking out, exercising authority and teaching men. That had to stop. The author told women to be silent and submissive, and reminded his readers about what happened the first time a woman was allowed to exercise authority over a man, in that little incident in the garden of Eden. No, the author argued, if women wanted to be saved, they were to have babies (1 Tim. 2:11-15).
Largely on the basis of this passage, the apostle Paul has been branded, by more liberation minded people of recent generations, as one of history's great misogynists. The problem, of course, is that Paul never said any such thing. And why does it matter? Because the passage is still used by church leaders today to oppress and silence women. Why are there no women priests in the Catholic Church? Why are women not allowed to preach in conservative evangelical churches? Why are there churches today that do not allow women even to speak? In no small measure it is because Paul allegedly taught that women had to be silent, submissive and pregnant. Except that the person who taught this was not Paul, but someone lying about his identity so that his readers would think he was Paul.
It may be one of the greatest ironies of the Christian scriptures that some of them insist on truth, while telling a lie. For no author is truth more important than for the "Paul" of Ephesians. He refers to the gospel as "the word of truth" (1:13); he indicates that the "truth is in Jesus"; he tells his readers to "speak the truth" to their neighbors (4:24-25); and he instructs his readers to "fasten the belt of truth around your waist" (6:14). And yet he himself lied about who he was. He was not really Paul.
It appears that some of the New Testament writers, such as the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy and Ephesians, felt they were perfectly justified to lie in order to tell the truth. But we today can at least evaluate their claims and realize just how human, and fallible, they were. They were creatures of their time and place. And so too were their teachings, lies and all.
Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the New York Times bestselling author of'Misquoting Jesus' and 'Jesus, Interrupted'. His latest book, 'Forged: Writing in the Name of God -- Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are', is now available from HarperOne.
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