Journalists have never been reckoned as specimens of brilliance, but ever since Woodward and Watergate, seem to have an immense ego problem that comes of thinking that the process of reporting what they think are new and great ideas somehow rubs off on them and makes them authorities. Such an one is the self-professed "Happy Heretic", Judith Hayes, who despite the moniker actually seems to be more irritated than happy. On the other hand, maybe she is in a happy mood and we don't want to see a bad mood.

Hayes is not the sort I normally bother with. All of her material and argumentation is second-hand, other than the wisecracks, and even those seem to have come from some random database of Skeptical Jokes Against The Religious Right. A reader asked me to look into Hayes' material, and what I found is typified by an October 2000 column entitled "The Jesus Puzzle" in which Hayes distills and dribbles out for her audience a summary of Earl's Doherty's Jesus Puzzle.

As a summary of Earl's case, it is adequate; as an argument against a historical Jesus, it is proportionately as laughable in scope as Earl's own work, and just as easily answered (as are all of Hayes' columns on subjects Biblical) by work on this page and on others we have referenced. Not that we expect any counter, or anything but summaries, from the likes of Hayes at all. The genre of the journalistic column or the editorial is by nature a venue for hurling argumentative elephants and biting sounds. We don't expect arguments like, Christianity "appealed to the masses, unwashed if you will---slaves, socially oppressed, disenfranchised---and told people that their unhappy lives were to be accepted graciously, since eternal reward was all that mattered" to be presented with more than a snuffle; much less corroborated by hard data, especially when the work of scholars like Stark and Meeks refute such silliness. We do expect fully an eighth of such works to be devoted to bland creations like Hayes' "Savior Soufflé" which includes in its ingredients "1 qt. Apollonius" and "¾ C sifted Mithraism". That Hayes thinks she has discovered things of relevance here is fairly well a statement of the depths of irrelevance journalists typically plumb. If Hayes wants to prove her worth, let's have a reply to the linked articles instead of sound-bite pap distilled from the extremists.

Skeptics may find the Happy Heretic helpful, but for my part, I found Hagar the Horrible a more scholarly read. And funnier.