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I return to London from a week in Jordan to find that it is quite as warm here as it was there, though the sun seems stronger there. It was certainly warmer here yesterday evening than any evening in the past week in Amman. I’m not complaining; I had a splendid time, and the weather was just right for sightseeing, of which I did a great deal. Helen and I saw the major sights a few years ago, so this was an opportunity to see some more obscure ones, in the company of friends who live out there. I’m afraid I put together a fairly demanding itinerary, but it all worked pretty well, and introduced them to lots of new places. We hired a car, and I was ferried around, barking commands like some colonial pro-consul.

Decapolis

The student of the New Testament is familiar with the Decapolis, the confederation of city-states that were part of the geography at the time of Jesus. The time that they break in most obviously is in the incident of Jesus and the herd of pigs, the “Gadarene swine” (of St Matthew), which St Mark calls “Gerasene”; those are the adjectives from the Decapolis cities of Gadara and Gerasa. Now neither is actually by Lake Galilee (Lake Tiberias as locals call it), but the gospels don’t mean the cities themselves, they refer to “the territory of the Gadarenes/Gerasenes” and we just don’t know how the territory of those city states worked. Well, Gerasa is Jerash, one of Jordan’s top two tourist attractions, and a very well-preserved classical city, which I visited thoroughly last time, and so was content to see (twice) from the road this time, but it doesn’t feel in any way close to the lake (it’s about 30 miles away). This time, though, I was able to visit Gadara (modern Umm Qais) which is on a hilltop from which you can see the lake. The story would make sense there, even if the swine were more likely to have plunged into the gorge of the Yarmuk river, which is nearby, as opposed to the lake, which is 5 or 6 miles away. That very top left-hand corner of Jordan is full of precipices, and so the story fits there. It’s one of the reasons to believe that Matthew used (and corrected) Mark, because “Gadarene” is just much more credible than “Gerasene”. When you’re there you can see that.

So I ticked off two of the Decapolis in Gerasa and Gadara, and I was staying in a third, because Amman was the classical Philadelphia (and they have considerably beautified the Forum). I also insisted that my friend take me to a fourth, Pella, which is on a hill overlooking the upper Jordan valley. Pella is the most extraordinarily evocative and lovely site, and we had it entirely to ourselves. You can look across the Jordan to the break in the hills that leads up to Nazareth, about 30 miles away on the Palestinian side, and simply wonder. Then I ticked off a surprise fifth, which I hadn’t expected, Capitolias. A local friend of my friends saw from Facebook that we were at Umm Qais and insisted we come to his family’s house, in Beit Ras, and in conversation it became clear that they too had a Roman theatre, and that Beit Ras was Capitolias, so we drove a few blocks, and there on a scruffy hillside was a pink stone theatre, recently restored but rather neglected (a characteristic Jordanian combination). We just managed to see it before dusk fell, with the assistance of locals who pointed out the hole in the fence. A happy piece of serendipity.

Stylites

Pella was exhilarating, but it was also really exciting to see a Stylite pillar at a place called Umm ar-Rasas, the Roman Castron Mefaa. There are some splendid mosaics in ruined churches, and an interesting expanse of ruins, but then about a mile away, across open country, is this amazing tower. It’s about 45 feet high, with a room at the top, (and what may be a room at the bottom) but otherwise solid, and with no means of ascent. Scholars believe this to be a Stylite pillar, built for a (presumably) 5^th century hermit to live on. I’ve been to Qalat Samaan, near Aleppo, where they built a vast church around the space where St Simeon Stylites’s pillar stood, but of that pillar only a boulder allegedly remained. Here was a structure that enabled you to understand the whole thing, because you could certainly have lived in the room at the top (though it would have been very windy). One of my friends was rather affronted by this showy sort of asceticism, and thought it a very attention-seeking and self-centred form of devotion; my own thought was what an enormous communal investment must have gone into this solitary enterprise, because obviously the Stylite always needed people to come and bring him food (which he would winch up), but what had never occurred to me before was that a custom-built pillar was a major (and expensive) construction project.  Perhaps he was a rich man and built his own pillar, but if not, then he must have had rich supporters paying for it. Either way, it suggests some communal investment in the spiritual exercise.

End of Term

Return to the schools to find my head teachers seriously looking forward to the holiday. I get vexed that they haven’t concentrated on doing the things that I want them to do, but then I gradually discover a litany of staff on long-term sickness, grievance procedures, capability procedures, accusations, staff giving notice and falling rolls. And these are two good schools. Both actually good, and “good” in Ofsted terms (which is not necessarily the same thing). I try to cheer them up by pointing out that they both stand to gain from the government’s new National Funding Formula, like most schools in Westminster, but unlike almost every other school in London, because of some obscure decision that was taken on the extinction of ILEA (back in the 1980s) which meant that Westminster schools have been much less well-funded than other London schools for thirty years. It may not happen, though, as Tory MPs in the shires are still complaining that not enough money has been taken away from the undeserving poor.