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Tale that would have captivated tabloid
papers
SVEN Goran Eriksson feels he has been harshly treated. He
endures the media's endless prying into his private life,
because he can't prevent it, and because he is paid £4m
a year to coach the England football squad to its hummock
of mediocrity and £4m buys back a lot of self-respect.
Half a century ago, when wartime habits of secrecy clung
like flypaper to British journalists, football never made
the front pages, and the carousing of influential men with
ambitious secretaries was not reported on any page at all.
On the other hand, it would have taken the England manager
of the Fifties, Walter Winterbottom, about 2,000 years to
earn as much as Sven has collected since Arsenal last lost
a League game.
This is a great time to be a celebrity, even if the ogling
of reporters does sometimes get embarrassing. I'd rather see
my head-and-shoulders in Heat magazine or Hello! than in the
prim Picture Post.
And I'm profoundly glad I wasn't a celeb in the days when
Rome ruled the Holy Land, because my head-and-shoulders could
have landed up in a much worse setting.
John the Baptist is about to enjoy a bout of 21st century
fame, a resurgence of celebrity which has already seen him
making headlines all over the world this week.
An archaeologist excavating a site west of Jerusalem has
uncovered what is claimed to be the Christian saint's headquarters.
The cave, close to Ain Karim, is expected to become a shrine
to pilgrims.
Though he was a Jewish prophet who was once the most famous
holy man in Judea, this New Testament character left no trace
among the scraps I remembered from the classroom.
Maybe my teachers in Cyprus, at a Catholic school, Terra
Santa College which was run by monks in the hills above Nicosia,
talked about this holy rebel, but I wasn't listening.
The first time the name grabbed my attention was in the early
Seventies, when I heard John Martyn sing a clever couplet:
''I'm John the Baptist, and this is my friend Salome/And you
can bet it's my head she wants, and not my heart only.''
And I thought: ''What's that all about?''
What it was all about was a story that the News of the World
would kill for, bursting with sex and violence and conspiracies
and heroism and much more sex.
John, who would be JB to gossip writers and paparazzi today,
was a charismatic wild man who claimed he could save your
soul by holding you underwater.
If you think people wouldn't flock today to be half-drowned
by a mad-eyed beardie in the name of religious faddism, then
you've never sat between two 40-something actresses at a literary
lunch as they compared horror stories about their colonic
irrigations.
JB was born in Ain Karim, and it does seem likely that this
cave, now on land tended by a kibbutz, was once the hermit's
palace where his followers came to have their sins washed
away.
The British archaeologist who discovered it, Shimon Gibson,
45, found a ritual baptism pool cut into the rock. Perhaps
it was to this cave that Herod Antipas's soldiers marched
when they dragged JB to prison.
The holy man had been preaching sermons that condemned Herod,
the son of Herod the Great, for marrying Herodias.
Herodias was a controversial choice of bride on three counts:
she was already married; her husband was Herod's brother Philip;
and she was Herod's own niece. (I told you the News of the
World would like it.)
JB told Herod to his face that he was a corrupt, evil, lecherous
old goat, and Herod rather admired him for it.
He even let JB start preaching again, from his prison cell,
and would sneak in at the back of the congregation to hear
himself reviled. Herodias didn't like JB. She thought he might
get her killed. And Herodias had a daughter, Salome.
Like her mother, Salome was Herod's niece, and nieces brought
out the worst in the king. He ordered her to dance, a performance
traditionally known as the Dance of the Seven Veils.
These days she would probably go to Max Clifford, but 2,000
years ago the fastest way for a girl to win favour was to
do a striptease for the monarch. She did win favour, any favour
she wanted.
Herod, when he could speak again, told his new Number One
niece she could have whatever she named. And because the whole
Dance of the Seven Veils thing was a honey-trap dreamed up
by Herodias, what Salome asked for was the head of John the
Baptist. On a silver platter.
The story was dramatised 1,900 years later by Oscar Wilde,
who found it decadently thrilling.
These days Oscar would probably go on a Channel Four chatshow
to trade camp innuendos with Graham Norton, but at the turn
of the century the hottest way to sell the story was with
a set of erotic drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.
Suddenly JB is hot again. Dr Gibson's cave is expected to
draw pilgrims in their thousands, which with Israel's tourist
industry in its current state has to be a good thing.
A crude portrait of the saint, carved into the rock by devotees
at least 15 centuries ago, gave the archaeologist his first
clue of the true history of the cave. The discovery of the
baptism pool, big enough for 30 people to be submerged at
a time, confirmed it.
''I sensed I was on the verge of making a major discovery,''
Dr Gibson said. ''I could feel tingling in my hands.''
As an experienced dowser, I suspect that tingling means the
archaeologist was subconsciously using his psychic senses
to uncover the site.
Book learning and spadework will only get you so far: at
some point you must let intuition take over.
It's like Salome's mother always told her: You've got to
use what God gave you if you want to get a head
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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