Witnesses of the Resurrection [1]

Christ's appearance behind locked doors by Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1308-11)

In the earliest days of Christianity an "apostle" was first and foremost a man who claimed to be an eyewitness of the Resurrection. Only a few days after the Crucifixion when two candidates were nominated for the vacancy created by the treachery of Judas, their qualification was that they had known Jesus personally both before and after His death and could offer firsthand evidence of the Resurrection in addressing the outer world. A few days later St. Peter, preaching the first Christian sermon, makes the same claim - "God raised Jesus, of which we all are witnesses". In the First Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul bases his claim to apostleship on the same ground - "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?" ...

The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection ... [Now] it is very important to be clear about what these people mean. When modern writers talk of the Resurrection, they usually mean one particular moment - the discovery of the Empty Tomb and the appearance of Jesus a few yards away from it. The story of that moment is what Christian apologists now chiefly try to support and skeptics chiefly try to impugn. But this almost exclusive concentration on the first five minutes or so of the Resurrection would have astoinished the earliest Christians teachers. In claiming to have seen the Resurrection they were not necessarily claiming to have seen that. Some of the had, some of them had not. It had no more importance than any of the other appearances of the risen Jesus - apart from the poetic and dramatic importance which the begnnings of things must always have. What they were claiming was that they had all, at one time or another, met Jesus during the fix or seven weeks that folowed his death. Sometimes they seem to have been alone when they did so, but on one occasion twleve of them saw Him together, and on another occasion about five hundred of them. St. Paul says that the majority of the five hundred were still alive when he wrote the First Letter to the Corinthians.
The "Resurrection" to which they bore witness was, in fact, not the action of rising from the dead but the state of having risen: a state, as they held, attested by intermittent meetings during a limited period. This termination of the period is important, for there is no possibility of isolating the doctrine of the Resurrection from that of the Ascension.

Extract from Miracles in The Joyful Christian by C S Lewis