The Body and the Blood

Retracing the path of Jesus's life from Bethlehem, to Egypt, to Nazareth, to what is today Lebanon and finally to Jerusalem, this volume takes readers on a journey through the modern Middle East. It also examines why Christianity could virtually disappear in the Holy Land within two generations.

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This journalistic pilgrimage seeks out the forgotten people of the Holy Land-its Christians-and shows how their dwindling numbers offer a sober lesson in understanding the modern Middle East. . Retracing the path of Jesus' life at the turn of a new millennium, award-winning journalist Charles M. Sennott finds a region riven by political revolt, religious conflict, apocalyptic prophecies and the quest for Jerusalem-just as it was 2,000 years ago. The Body and the Blood is Sennott's journalistic pilgrimage through the Holy Land from Nazareth and Bethlehem to Egypt and Lebanon and finally Jerusalem itself, during a gripping a year that was also a critical turning point in the future of the region. Sennott's journey weaves through the local Christian communities of the Middle East, a population which is disappearing dramatically in the land where the faith began. Where a century ago Christians represented as much as 20 percent of the population of what is today Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, now they comprise less than 2 percent of the total population. Historians and demographers fear that within two more generations, native Christianity could virtually disappear in the Holy Land.
Timely and moving, firmly grounded in the troubled history of the region, The Body and the Blood dares to ask questions of the spirit as well as of politics. Two thousand years after Jesus' birth, is there a place for his followers in the land he called home? Has the West fatally misunderstood, even abandoned, the Christians of the Middle East? And most provocatively, could Christianity help answer the riddle of peace in the region? Sennott's elegiac, controversial book is sure to spark national, and international, discussion.