Who is Jesus? How are we to understand him? In the novel, The Brothers K, David James Duncan tells the story of the Chance family, a family of four boys, two girls, an agnostic father, and a mother of passionate fundamentalist faith. They all have very different ideas about who Jesus is. One of the boys, Kincaid, describes how each family member tries to make sense of Jesus and religion:

It's strange the way everybody has their own pet notion about Jesus, and nobody's pet notion seems to agree with anybody else's. Grandma, for instance says He's "just a defunct social reformer." Then there's Papa, who once said He's God's Son all right, and that He survived the crucifixion just fine, but after the two-thousand-year-old funeral service his cockeyed followers called Christianity probably ma…