Jesus in Kenya: Wealth, Power, and the Gospel of Poor

What if we returned Jesus to the material world in which Rome actually killed him?Jesus in Kenya begins with a familiar figure and asks unfamiliar questions.Before He became the centre of a global religion, Jesus was a worker among a governed people. His world was one of land, debt, taxation, inequality, religious authority and empire. His teachings spoke repeatedly about wealth, hunger, sharing, power and the poor. Then the teaching acquired hands. Words became action. Action gathered a crowd. And the crowd became a threat.Rome killed Jesus.But Rome did not kill the movement.That creates the contradiction at the centre of this book: How did the religion of a man executed by imperial power eventually become capable of standing beside empire-and later arrive in colonial Kenya through institutions entangled with imperial power?Grace Musyoka turns the question toward Africa. What did African societies already know about land, labour, reciprocity, wealth and human obligation before colonialism taught Africans to describe their own knowledge as backward?Across ten chapters, Jesus in Kenya places Jesus, African communal systems, Marxism and capitalism into conversation-and kneels before none of them.This is not ultimately a book about whether Jesus was a communist.It asks a harder question: What do human beings owe each other?And once we have answered that, what must we build so that the answer survives us?