Is fiction confusing the facts?

The lesson from this week's best-seller list is simple: God sells. But what worries some scholars is that the hottest religious books depart from traditional Christian teaching or distort the faith's origins.

The latest pulse-pounder in the "Left Behind" series about the end of the world — "Glorious Appearing" — couldn't have appeared more gloriously, at No. 1 among Publishers Weekly's fiction best sellers. It edges out another religion-themed novel, "The Da Vinci Code," which has ranked among the top three for 54 straight weeks.

American's fiction market has never seen such a juxtaposition, says Publishers Weekly religion editor Lynn Garrett. Combined with the success of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" — now eighth on the U.S. all-time box-office list — it makes an obvious statement.

"Whether they feel negatively or positively about religion, people in American culture think about and care about it," Garrett says.

Jerry Jenkins, co-author of "Glorious Appearing" with Tim LaHaye, calls the phenomenon "God hunger — people looking for something beyond themselves."

Yet the success of the books troubles some critics, largely because the authors have made unusual claims that — though they employ fiction — what they're writing is true.

Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" is a thriller whose characters malign traditional Christianity as fraudulent. But both liberal and conservative writers say it's rife with errors.

Among inaccuracies they list: The characters' claims that belief in Jesus' divinity appeared in the fourth century rather than the first century; that the four New Testament Gospels became authoritative in the fourth century rather than the second century; and that the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic writings (deemed heretical by the church) contain the earliest Christian records — though one Gnostic text does have some scholarly promoters.

"Da Vinci" also supposes that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired a royal Judeo-French bloodline that still exists — and that sinister Christians suppressed this. That plot comes from the 1982 book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," which a New York Times reviewer called "rank nonsense."