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.