How did they come to hold together? How had they not yielded to the
temptation to seek safety by flight, which would have been the natural
course after the death of their Leader on a charge of treason against
the Roman power? The process of disintegration had begun, and we see it
going on in the conduct of the disciples before the Resurrection. The
'Shepherd was smitten,' and, as a matter of course, 'the sheep' began
to 'scatter.' And yet here we find them back in Galilee, in their old
haunts, and not trying to escape by separation, which would have been
the first step suggested to ordinary men in an ordinary state of
things. But where everybody knew them, and they knew everybody, and
everybody knew them to be disciples of Jesus Christ, thither they go,
and hold together as if they had still a living centre and a uniting
bond. How did that come about? The fact that after Christ's death there
was a group of men united together simply and solely as disciples, and
exhibiting their unity as disciples conspicuously, in the face of the
men that knew them best, this forms a strange phenomenon that needs an
explanation. And there is only one explanation of it, that Jesus Christ
had risen from the dead. That drew them together once more. You cannot
build a Church on a dead Christ; and of all the proofs of the
Resurrection, I take it that there is none that it is harder for an
unbeliever to account for, in harmony with his hypothesis, than the
simple fact that Christ's disciples held together after He was dead,
and presented a united front to the world.
So, then, the fact of the group is itself significant, and we may claim
it as being a morsel of evidence for the historical veracity of the
resurrection of Jesus Christ.