Actually in addition to the apostles (11 of whom died as martyrs if we are to believe Wiki). St. Paul said there were 500 people who witnessed the resurrected Jesus and over half of them were still alive at the time he wrote his letter. So Paul was putting his whole ministry and life's work on the line by saying over 250 people were "still alive" who were witnesses. Any skeptics at the time should have been able to prove Paul's claim false. Yet, I know of no writings of skeptics or anyone else that claim they were unable to find any of the over 250 witnesses Paul was talking about.
Over 500 people witnessing a resurrected Christ could explain the speedy growth of Christianity in the repressive Roman empire in spite of no decent transportation or communication.
Er, who were the 250 witnesses? Four or five names will be plenty to convince me they were real. It's quite safe to claim unnamed witnesses. Skeptics were awfully rare back then, it's taken a very long time for the idea that one should expect some hard evidence before believing in something hard to believe in to fully develop.
I've heard there are thousands of witnesses to Kim Sung Il being carried off to a sacred mountain by cranes when he died. Millions believe it. Eyewitness testimony is the next worse type of evidence next to hearsay. What you've got is hearsay of eyewitness testimony, assuming the documents haven't been tampered with or been mistranslated badly enough to change the gist of the accounts.
BTW, there is a simple explanation for all of this that allows the NT to be pretty much a factual account: Jesus may not have been dead. He was taken off the cross early because he appeared to be dead, that may have been a mistake. It used to be fairly common to mistake someone deeply unconscious as being dead. So he wakes up in his tomb, still wounded, but alive, and escapes. The rock may not have been there in the first place, but if there really was an earthquake at the crucifixion, aftershocks could have moved any size rock. Jesus himself would have had no reason to believe he hadn't really died.
I'm just spitballing here, and leaving out the possibility many Muslims believe, that the whole thing was planned out in advance with a drug to make Jesus seem dead, followed by a rescue (probably bribing the Roman guards). Remember the authorities at the time feared his followers would steal the body of Jesus (to claim resurrection?), which is why they went to so much trouble to seal up the tomb in the first place.
Remember, in the biblical accounts there
were no eyewitnesses to the resurrection. People saw him die, and later saw him alive. No one actually saw him rise from the dead.
So, nothing made up from whole cloth, everybody being honest (barring the Muslim version), and still there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for hundreds of people mistakenly
thinking Jesus was resurrected.
This is not to put down other objections to the story, but effectively it doesn't prove a resurrection even if it's 'true'.
