Strengthen your faith in God's word

Paul says the risen Christ “was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:5). But Judas had already hanged himself (Matthew 27:5), and Matthias was not chosen in his place until after the ascension, when “the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles” (Acts 1:26). The Gospels say the Lord “appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat” (Mark 16:14), and the two from Emmaus “found the eleven gathered together” (Luke 24:33). There were not twelve to see Him.

Preferred: Every one of the twelve saw Him. The apostles would not fill Judas’s place with any man who had not seen the risen Christ. Peter set the condition: “of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1:21–22). Matthias was one of those two who met it (1:23), and “was numbered with the eleven apostles” (1:26). He had been with them through the forty days in which the Lord was “seen of them” (1:3), and he had seen Him risen.

The Gospels show where he could have been. When the two came back from Emmaus they “found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them,” and “as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them” (Luke 24:33–36). The Lord appeared to the eleven with others of the company present, men who had companied with them from the beginning, as Matthias had. And the one apostle missing that evening saw Him too. “Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came” (John 20:24); but “after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them,” and the Lord said to him, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered, “My Lord and my God,” and Jesus said, “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed” (20:26–29).

So when Paul writes that Christ “was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:5), he names the twelve apostles as they stood when he wrote, and every one of them was an eyewitness. That is the point of his list: these are witnesses who saw Him, “of whom the greater part remain unto this present” (15:6), and could be asked. The twelve preached it so from the first: Peter, “standing up with the eleven,” said, “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:14, 32); “witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead” (10:41).

Also given: That “the twelve” is the name of the apostles as a body, kept when one is missing. John calls Thomas “one of the twelve” on the evening he was absent (John 20:24), and Joseph’s brethren said, “Thy servants are twelve brethren … and one is not” (Genesis 42:13). Gill: “because their original number, when first chosen and called, were twelve, they still went by the same name.” This is true of how the name is used, but it leaves one of the twelve without a sight of the Lord, and Acts says none of them was without it.

Also given: Chrysostom, asking “of what twelve apostles does he here speak?”, answers that Christ may have appeared to them after Matthias was chosen, as He did to Paul himself; Paul gives no times, and there were many appearances.

A few copies change the word to “eleven” (the Latin Vulgate and the Claromontane, Gill notes) to remove the difficulty. The KJV keeps “twelve,” and the text needs no change.