The record
What Changed
By the AD 50s, Christians were already passing this around.
that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
1 Corinthians 15:3-8 · Mark 14:66-72 · John 7:5 · Galatians 1:13 · Galatians 1:18-19 · Galatians 2:9 · Acts 2:22-32 · Acts 4:1-22 · Acts 5:17-42 · Acts 15:13-21 · Oxford Bibliographies, 1 Corinthians · James Ware, The Resurrection of Jesus in the Pre-Pauline Formula of 1 Cor 15.3-5, New Testament Studies · P46 - CSNTM
They say
The resurrection story could have developed later.
The scene
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul reminds the church at Corinth of something he says he had already received and passed on to them: Christ died, was buried, was raised and appeared to Cephas and Jesus' twelve disciples. (Cephas is Peter, by the way. He's known as Simon or Simon Peter too. Nobody thought to make this easy for us two thousand years later.)
Paul didn't invent this when he wrote to Corinth. The tradition he says he received goes back to the earliest years of the Christian movement.
Paul also tells us that three years after his conversion, he went to Jerusalem and stayed with Peter for fifteen days. He met James, Jesus' brother, there too.
Peter is an interesting name to find first on the list.
On the night Jesus was arrested, Peter was so frightened he denied three times that he even knew Jesus.
Not long afterwards, Acts has that same Peter publicly preaching in Jerusalem that Jesus had risen from the dead. He and John are arrested and ordered to stop speaking about Jesus. They refuse. Later, Peter and the other apostles are arrested, and this time they're beaten before being released.
They carry on preaching.
Paul's list keeps going. He says Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at once, most of whom, he adds, were still alive when he wrote.
Then James.
John's Gospel says that during Jesus' ministry, his brothers didn't believe in him. James ended up becoming one of the leaders of the church in Jerusalem.
Then others Paul calls apostles, and finally Paul himself.
Paul is an odd addition to the list too. He hadn't been one of Jesus' followers mourning his death. By his own account, he'd been persecuting the church.
There he is, writing to the Corinthians, saying that Jesus had been raised and that people had seen him alive.
The point
The resurrection claim was there near the beginning.
Sit with this
What changed?