Religious scholars attack 2 best sellers
By Richard N. Ostling
Associated Press
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" is No. 1 on the fiction list of Publishers Weekly. It edges out another religion-themed novel, "The Da Vinci Code," which has ranked among the top three for 54 straight weeks.
Publishers Weekly religion editor Lynn Garrett said, "Whether they feel negatively or positively about religion, people in American culture think about and care about it."
Jerry Jenkins, co-author of "Glorious Appearing" with Tim LaHaye, calls the phenomenon "God hunger."
The books' success 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.
"Da Vinci" also supposes that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired a royal Judeo-French bloodline.
At first, "Da Vinci" drew little religious opposition because people "didn't subject it to the same kind of scrutiny they would a nonfiction book," Garrett says. But when Brown told NBC that "absolutely all of it" is true, the Rev. Darrell Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary decided the novelist was undermining Christianity.
Meanwhile, the "Left Behind" authors think their series depicts events of the sort the Bible predicted for Jesus' Second Coming.
The Rev. Barbara Rossing, a Bible professor with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, charges that the series preaches despair and that it distorts biblical teaching about the future, Middle East politics and social responsibility. To her, it "glorifies violence and war," exploits "Americans' love for disaster films and survivalist plot lines" and in general "attacks the heart of Christianity."
Jenkins, who dismisses the criticism, says some "Left Behind" readers have become new followers of Jesus.