Where did the Jesus myth come from?

[Cyberman]

No, you said that historians are prevented from reaching the conclusion of JC's resurrection.

I did. That's because it would never pass muster in a peer review. There are professional historians that have published peer reviewed articles that separately draw the conclusion that the resurrection occurred in their non peer reviewed publications.

That's the whole point of peer-review; to weed out bad or inconsistent science. Without it we have the scientific equivalent of the creationist rumour mill, in which some preacher comes up with some slam-dunk 'fact' which is then spread around like some veneral disease without any attempt at correcting it or even verifying it.

At one time, the only way to explain the propagation of light through space was to propose the existence of a mysterious "æther " which carried the lightwaves in the same manner as air propagates sound. If not for peer-reviewed scientific investigation, we might very well believe in the æther's existence to this day.

On the other foot, we have the story of the infamous "Nebraska Man". The story as told by creationists is that in 1917, geologist Harold Cook found a fossilised tooth which appeared to be significant. The Illustrated London News carried an artist's detailed sketch of what became known as Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, family structure and all, based on the proportions of the species now identified as Homo erectus. Unfortunately the tooth was found some eight years later to have belonged to an extinct species of pig. This is cited by creationists to this very day by way of showing how stupid scientists are and how they're so desperate for evolution to be proved right that they'll invent fraudulent fossils left right and centre.

The bit they don't tell you is that the newspaper sketch had nothing to do with scientists, evolutionary or otherwise. It was never intended to be a scientifically-accurate depiction of the find; in fact the American palaeontologist Henry Osborn (who, sadly, was not the Green Goblin so far as we know) described the sketch in 1922 as "a figment of the imagination [of the artist] of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate."

The point I'm hoping to get across is that peer-review, far from being some kind of conspiratorial D-Notice, is a vital cog in the scientific process. Creationist preachers have no such equivalent, with the result that nothing is verified or corrected. Peer-review is no impediment to the scientific process, any more than the rules of cricket are an impediment to the game, or the rules of the courtroom are an impediment to the justice system. If something "would never pass muster in a peer review" there's a reason; it's not simply out of spite. Bad science, like bad historical research, will always be found out.