NOTES for Mat 28:1-20
Even during His earthly ministry, Jesus said that He had come to bring not peace but a sword, meaning the division that His witness to the Kingdom would cause. This was so before His resurrection, and after that event the division between those who accept and those who reject became even more noticeable. It would seem that trying to suppress such a significant event, even for unbelievers, is a hopeless undertaking, and yet attempts to do this began from the very start, from the first day when the Risen One appeared to those who no longer hoped to see Him alive.
And later, those who denied Christianity almost never tried to explain what the apostles and other witnesses saw and testified to. Their entire argument was usually reduced to the claim that all the testimony was deliberate or unintentional deception (in the second case people usually speak of the good-faith error of witnesses who took their hallucinations or the fruit of their overheated imagination for reality).
Why then, over centuries and millennia of Christian history, have Christianity's opponents come up with no other, more convincing explanations? It should be clear to everyone that a movement based on deception, or even on good-faith error, cannot exist for millennia! The answer to this question is simpler than one would think, and it is contained in the Gospel itself.
Even in the time of the Savior's earthly ministry, His words were received with hostility by many not because those who rejected them had some logical or other arguments, but because the Kingdom and the One who brought it into the world were unacceptable to them in principle, at any rate as they appeared before them. To accept the Kingdom to which Christ bears witness and its laws means for everyone to stop being what he is, to change radically, and therefore to part with his former self, no matter how much at times the one accepting may like himself. If a person does not want this and is not ready for it, he says "no" to Christ and the Kingdom, a "no" that for him no longer needs explanation.
For those around him, the easiest way to explain his refusal is to declare the whole story a lie, a delusion, a fabrication of adherents; in a word, anything that would rule out further discussion in advance. This was so in the days of the Savior's resurrection, it was so centuries later, and the situation remains the same today. Of course, everyone has the right to make his own choice when it concerns his own salvation. The main thing is not to deceive oneself about the motives of this choice. And not to deceive others either.