Vendor Just Needs One Tourist To Believe This Jesus’s iPhone Case

“God knows there are enough fools among tourists, and among Christians. I need only one who is both, to visit my store and buy the case.”

Jerusalem, May 31 – The owner of a souvenir stall in the Old City keeps an eye out for the right mark among the thousands of foreign visitors who will enter his shop this year, he confessed today, as even a single such potential buyer will secure his economic future: someone gullible and rich enough to pay a premium for the battered mobile accessory he touts as having belonged to the Christian savior right before crucifixion.

Omar Atef, 46, told confidants Tuesday that the financial security he craves has so far eluded him as the city’s tourism-dependent economy has waxed and waned amid decades in which bouts of terrorism, unrest, and, more recently, a global pandemic wrought their havoc on his establishment’s revenue. However, with one naïve tourist’s willingness to part with tens of thousands of dollars or euros in exchange for a priceless artifact can change all that permanently, and he has just the artifact: an iPhone case that Jesus himself used.

“Just one foolish, rich Christian tourist,” he prayed at his market stall on David Street, just off the Old City’s main thoroughfare inside Jaffa Gate. “One tourist who will accept that this belonged to Jesus. God knows there are enough fools among tourists, and among Christians. I need only one who is both, to visit my store and buy the case.”

Atef found the case on the ground not far from his shop a few weeks ago. The idea to tout it as having belonged to Jesus two thousand years ago occurred to him as he lay awake one night last month, worrying about tourist traffic that has bounced back from the COVID-related drought, but not enough to pay all of his expenses. “I stepped on it right near one of those ubiquitous archaeological digs,” he recalled. “And a few hours later it just clicked in my head.”

“I can picture the scene right now,” he continued. “I have it scripted. As soon as I identify the right person, I’ll look around furtively, lean in, and offer to show him something that only the right people will appreciate. Then I go back behind the counter, take another suspicious look around, for show, and pull out the phone case, all wrapped in some old cloth, letting him see it for a bit before wrapping it up all safe again.”

“‘Unearthed along the Via Dolorosa – the Savior dropped it as he was lugging that cross to his own execution,’ I’ll say,” he predicted. “Just the right mix of known geography and supposedly privileged facts about the object. Also a warning about not saying anything at customs on the way out – the authorities have no respect for the sacred and are only interested in making a buck out of it.”

One attempt failed this afternoon, however, because the target of the exercise voiced the conviction that Jesus insisted on Android.

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