What Happened After the Resurrection?
The Gospels and Paul's letters describe a series of resurrection appearances to various followers. This includes 1 Corinthians (chapter 15 in particular) which is among the earliest Christian writings known today and predates the Gospels.
Mary Magdalene, the wider group of disciples and a couple on the road to Emmaus, were among those who say they saw Jesus alive again after his death. According to Paul, and in addition to appearances to Peter and many disciples, "more than five hundred" people saw him. Paul too claimed he saw Jesus.
The order, locations, and details differ across accounts. Luke and Acts place appearances (and Jesus’ “ascension” in and around Jerusalem, while Matthew includes an appearance in Galilee. These differences scholars generally attribute to different and independent oral traditions recorded somewhat differently by each writer.
This does seem much more likely than a single harmonised eyewitness record. Imagine too how any normal person, who knows that the dead do not rise, would recall the reappearance of someone that they knew for a fact had been dead but is now alive again. Most of us might struggle to describe the event calmly.
Acts describes a forty-day period of appearances before an ascension event, a timeframe specific to Luke's two-volume work and not stated identically elsewhere. What can be said with confidence, independent of belief about the resurrection's nature, is that Paul's letter to the Corinthians, written within about twenty-five years of the events, shows that claims of Jesus resurrection were circulating very early. To Paul, this as an already-established tradition which he was passing along, rather anything new that he was introducing.
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