For forty days

In my earlier work, Theophilos, I dealt with everything that Jesus had done and taught from the beginning until the day He gave his instructions to the apostles He had chosen through the Holy Spirit, and was taken up to heaven. He had shown Himself alive to them after His Passion by many demonstrations: for forty days He had continued to appear to them and tell them about the Kingdom of God.

Acts of the Apostles 1:1-3 Jerusalem Bible

Reading the book of Acts, and the epistles written by holy apostle Paul and the other apostles, it is easy to forget that Peter, James and John, Jude and possibly the unnamed writer of the letter to the Hebrews (if it was not Paul) were those to whom Jesus 'had shown Himself alive… for forty days.' It's also easy to forget that Paul did not have this experience of Jesus, and what this would mean in his relationship to the other apostles.

Imagine how you would think and feel, if you were part of that closely knit group of the Twelve, with the Equals-to-the-Apostles (female apostles such as Mary Magdalen and Photini the Samaritan) and the other unnamed disciples to whom Jesus had personally shown Himself after His death and resurrection, and you were witnessing and preaching to others. Suddenly, here comes a man who is your adamant persecutor, and now he is witnessing and preaching about the Jesus that appeared to you, and saying things that only you, who saw and heard Christ for forty days after his rising from the dead, should be able to tell others.

Where does he get the idea he can do this? He wasn't with you when Jesus taught you the mysteries of the Kingdom for forty days. He wasn't with you when, unexpectedly on the fortieth day, 'He was lifted up while [you] looked on, and a cloud took Him from [your] sight' (Acts 1:9). Some of you even remember that this man Saul (that's his real name) stood guard over the pile of clothing that the murderers of Stephanos took off so they could stone the first martyr with more strength, unhampered by their heavy wraps. Yes, Saul, just like the evil king who persecuted David, the ancestor of the Messiah Jesus.

It could only have been a miracle that changed the original apostles and disciples to enable them to accept Paul as one of them, perhaps an even greater miracle than his meeting with Christ on the Damascus road.

But the forty days, that precious time of fellowship with the risen Jesus, the time when His mother, His close disciples—now apostles—both male and female, heard His lips and saw His eyes 'tell them about the Kingdom of God,' what of those days?

None of the testimony had been put down in writing yet. The hearing of the Word of God from His own lips, handed over by the risen Christ to His holy apostles, had not yet ripened in their hearts and minds. It had to be lived first, at least a little, before it could be committed to writing. Even after two generations, the last of the holy apostles, John the beloved of the Lord, could still say, 'There are several things I have to tell you, but I have thought it best not to trust them to paper and ink' (2 John 1:12).

For forty days, the sacred number of days that Moses was with Yahweh on the mountain top, the One who was both Lawgiver and God in His own person imparted the saving knowledge, planted the seed of the apostolic witness in those whom He was about to send into the world. They were good soil indeed, the seed planted in them bearing not just thirty or sixty or even a hundredfold, but even more as the Lord Himself gave increase.

And so the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven; there at the right hand of God He took His place, while they, going out, preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the Word by the signs that accompanied it.

Mark 16:19-20