Seek, and ye shall find

The bearded figure clad in white robes and wandering barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem is not, in fact, the messiah. But neither is he a very naughty boy.  Rather, he is a middle-aged man from Texas in need of a shower who, like the German across the street claiming to be Saint Paul, is caught in the grip of Jerusalem Syndrome — first clinically described in 1937. The afflicted are visitors so struck by their encounter with the city they become convinced they are ‘prophets, messiahs or redeemers. They can no longer distinguish between reality and fevered imagination.’

These are extreme cases, but they might be better thought of as extreme symptoms of a gentler, everyday blurring of reality and imagination that occurs when exploring Jerusalem, a city built from scripts and mortar. T.E. Lawrence in 1917 caught the feeling well: the ‘forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present’.