Personally, I think it is a bit more interesting that people WANT to believe it. Is it the fact that the book is taking on an organization that has such a broad influence on our culture and we want to see it with egg on it's face?
It is an entertaining book - or at least I found it to be so - but I've read lots of books with "different" takes on culture and history and I never fully believed them as fact. They may have lead me to do more research on a topic, but bostly they were simply a good read.
I've thought more about the "fact" page that starts out the book. If a fact page appears in a work of fiction, is it still fact? I have to admit that I initially took it to be factual information and it did set the tone for thinking, perhaps, there was some fact in the story he was telling. There are many revisionist historical theories out there that would proport that some of the "fictional facts" about Christ are plausable. I experienced some of them in college in the mid 80's.
Oh, and vampires DO exist, don't they?
