"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 astonished the earliest Christian teachers. In claiming to have seen the Resurrection they were not necessarily claiming to have seen that. Some of them 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 beginnings of things must always have. What they were claiming was that they had all, at one time or another, met Jesus during the six of seven weeks that followed His death. Sometimes they seem to have been alone when they did so, but on one occasion twelve 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, i.e. in about A.D. 55."
C. S. Lewis, Miracles, Chapter 16
“ … Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures … he was buried … he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures … he appeared to Peter … and then to the Twelve … he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep … he appeared to James, then to all the apostles … last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”
St. Paul in 1st Letter to Corinthians 15: 3 – 8 (circa A.D. 55)
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