Look at the whole pattern.
The first witnesses: women. In the legal system of the first century, their testimony was not admissible in a court.
The first individual person to see the Risen One: Mary Magdalene. A woman of Galilee healed of seven demons. Probably the least socially credible person in the entire group.
Then, two disciples walking home, defeated. Then, the Eleven frightened in a locked room. Then, Thomas the skeptic. Then, seven fishermen in Galilee. Then, a crowd of five hundred brothers. Then, James, the brother of Jesus who had grown up thinking his brother was mad. Then, Paul, the professional persecutor of the church.
The resurrection revealed itself from the margins inward, reaching the centers of power last of all.
If the resurrection had been a political movement or a propaganda strategy, the first witnesses would have been respectable religious leaders, Roman authorities who could legitimize it, Pharisees with institutional credibility. Instead it chose, deliberately, the powerless and the overlooked.
It began with a woman too grieved to recognize whom she was seeing. It moved on to two defeated walkers. It reached a group of men hidden in fear. And it ended, in forty days, in a list Paul could verify person by person.
The Kingdom of the Risen One entered through the cracks of the social system, rising from below long before it ever touched the center of the empire.
And the first name written on the chain belonged to a woman whose testimony, by the law of her time, counted for nothing in a court, yet whose word, according to the Gospel, would outweigh that of any judge.