Today in Marine Corps History

6 June 1918: Marines advanced into the forest against German machine guns. Arguably, this was the most catastrophic day in Marine Corps History to this date with 1087 men killed or wounded. Two assaults take place. At 0500, the 1st Battalion 5th Marines attacks west of Belleau Wood straightening the front and capturing strategic Hill 142 to support an assault on the wooded area. Twelve hours later battalions of 5th and 6th Marine Regiments frontally assault the woods from south and west and capture Bouresches on the east edge of the woods. They emerged with the German nickname Teufelhunden, or "devil dogs," after breaking through the front lines.

What the Apostles Meant by C.S. Lewis

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 Christians 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 Christians 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 appearance 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 or 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 55 ad.

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 (except for the special, and in some ways different, meeting vouchedsafed to St Paul). This termination of the period is important, for.... there is no possibility of isolating the doctrine of the Resurrection from that of the Ascension.

The Apostolic Witness by C.S. Lewis

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 were treachery of Judah, their qualification was that they had known Jesus personally both before and after His death and could offer first-hand evidence of the Resurrection in addressing the outer would (Acts 1:22). A few days later St. Peter, preaching the first Christian sermon, makes the same claim - 'God raised Jesus, of which we all (we Christians) are witnesses' (Acts 2:32). In the first Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul bases his claim to the apostleship on the same ground - 'Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?' (1:9).

As this qualification suggests l, to preach the Resurrection..... The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts
 The Resurrection, and it's consequences, we're the 'gospel' or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the 'gospels', the narrative of our Our Lord's life and death, we're composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it..... The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. If they had died without making anyone else believe this 'gospel' no gospels would ever have been written.