I've addressed issues like these before, such as on page 248 of our e-book The Infidel Delusion. I want to reiterate some of the points I've made before and add to them.
As I mentioned in The Infidel Delusion, in both early Christian and early non-Christian sources, there are references to Christians' ability to avoid suffering in some way by remaining silent or recanting (Tacitus, Annals, 15:44; Pliny the Younger, Letters, 10:96-97; Justin Martyr, First Apology, 4; Origen, Against Celsus, 2:13, 2:17). The sources I just cited aren't the only examples that are extant. There are many others. Even if we didn't have such evidence, we'd have multiple reasons to reject the skeptical objection under consideration here, as I'll explain below. And even if the resurrection witnesses hadn't had an opportunity to recant, they could have avoided imprisonment, torture, execution, and such by not becoming resurrection witnesses to begin with, especially ones in positions of church leadership. See a post I wrote earlier this month for more about the atmosphere of persecution and other forms of suffering that existed in early Christianity from the start.
We should keep in mind that official governmental settings aren't all that's relevant here. Whatever official and traditional procedures the Jewish and pagan authorities had in place for handling situations like the ones under consideration, not every relevant context would have fallen into that sort of category. An individual like an apostle would first have to be apprehended and brought before whoever was going to make a decision about what would happen to him. Much of what would occur in the early stages of the process would happen at an unofficial level. A crowd who finds you somewhere can do whatever they want before any religious authority, governmental officer, or other such figure becomes involved. As we often see in the gospels, Acts, and elsewhere, much of the danger Jesus and the resurrection witnesses experienced was of that kind of unofficial nature. A crowd wants to beat you up, throw you over a cliff, stone you, or whatever. Even in contexts that are of a more official nature, there are different stages involved, with some unofficial elements mixed in and a lot of conversations back and forth, negotiations, and so on. A person who's arrested has conversations with the people arresting him, there are discussions that occur before a trial begins, etc.
We see things like these over and over again in sources from the first century onward. A good place to start is with one of Jesus' parables, the one about the unforgiving slave in Matthew 18:21-35. Notice something that happens twice in the parable (verses 26 and 29). The person who owes the money takes the initiative to negotiate with the person to whom the money is owed (a king, a government official, in the first case). Similarly, an apostle or any other resurrection witness who wanted to escape governmental punishment, an angry crowd, or whatever else could take the initiative to negotiate. And that negotiation could occur in an unofficial or official context. It's not as though we need a record of some kind of official governmental policy of offering an opportunity to recant. The parable in Matthew 18 likely includes a couple of references to debtors asking for mercy on their own initiative (including before a king) because that sort of thing is a common occurrence that people are familiar with, find relatable, etc. Any resurrection witness who wanted to could have taken the initiative to negotiate, as the slaves discussed in the Matthew 18 parable do, and the early opponents of Christianity would have had an interest in noticing it and disseminating information about it in order to discredit the Christian movement.
We see examples of one or more of the scenarios I've referred to above in many sources from the first century onward. The man healed of blindness in John 9, for example, is given a chance by the religious authorities to renounce Jesus (verse 24) before they later punish him. Peter is moved to deny Christ three times by common people in an unofficial context, not by government officials or in any formal setting (Mark 14:66-71). Herod Antipas and Pilate try to get what they want from Jesus through conversations with him (Luke 23:1-12), Pilate even commenting, "You do not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you, and I have authority to crucify you?" (John 19:10). In Acts 24:26, we're even told that another government official, Felix, held Paul in custody with the hope of getting a bribe from him. That effort at getting a bribe was something that occurred under the table, not an exercise of official government practice. Acts and Paul's letters tell us about opportunities Paul had to negotiate with his opponents, in trial settings and other more official contexts and in contexts of a more unofficial nature. Similarly, later material about the death of James the brother of Jesus includes reference to an opportunity to recant (Hegesippus' comments in Eusebius, Church History, 2:23:8-16). And so on.
When somebody did take advantage of an opportunity to depart from the faith, give in to the pressure of a crowd, recant before a government official, or some such thing, both the early Christians and their opponents took note of it and made an issue of it (Judas' apostasy, Peter's triple denial of Christ, Demas' apostasy, the controversies over readmitting lapsed Christians in later church history, etc.). A common argument against Christianity was to criticize Jesus for choosing such poor leaders for his movement, men like Judas and Peter. Celsus and other ancient critics of Christianity made much of Judas' apostasy and the temporary unfaithfulness of Peter, such as his triple denial of Christ and his behavior in Galatians 2. The issue comes up over and over again in interactions between the early Christians and their enemies (John Cook, The Interpretation Of The New Testament In Greco-Roman Paganism [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002], 48, 158-59, 210-12, 247, 315-16). Though Peter is criticized for his denials of Christ, his actions in Galatians 2, and other faults, he's not criticized for anything like Judas' apostasy or renouncing the faith in the circumstances surrounding his (Peter's) death. There's no non-Christian objection to an apostasy of, say, Thomas or Andrew, like the objection to the apostasy of Judas that's frequently brought up. The fact that the ancient enemies of Christianity so often discussed the unfaithfulness of men like Judas and Peter, yet didn't object to anything like Paul or John renouncing the faith when facing persecution, is a significant line of evidence that there wasn't apostasy among the relevant sources (the apostles and other resurrection witnesses). For further evidence to that effect, see the many comments sources contemporary with the apostles and later sources made about the faithfulness of the apostles, such as the examples discussed here.
As I've mentioned above, we see interest in things like offering Christians an opportunity to recant and offering to negotiate with them in something like a trial setting before the resurrection even occurred, as examples like the blind man in John 9 and Pilate's discussions with Jesus illustrate. It should be common sense to all of us that the early opponents of Christianity, including those alive at the time of the resurrection witnesses, would have been aware of the value of offering opportunities to recant, negotiate, and so forth. To add to the many examples I've cited already, think of what happened with Polycarp, probably the most significant Christian leader of the second century, when he was arrested:
And as he was brought forward, the tumult became great when they heard that Polycarp was taken. And when he came near, the proconsul asked him whether he was Polycarp. On his confessing that he was, [the proconsul] sought to persuade him to deny [Christ], saying, 'Have respect to thy old age,' and other similar things, according to their custom, [such as], 'Swear by the fortune of Caesar; repent, and say, Away with the Atheists.' But Polycarp, gazing with a stern countenance on all the multitude of the wicked heathen then in the stadium, and waving his hand towards them, while with groans he looked up to heaven, said, 'Away with the Atheists.' Then, the proconsul urging him, and saying, 'Swear, and I will set thee at liberty, reproach Christ;' Polycarp declared, 'Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?' (The Martyrdom Of Polycarp, 9)
Notice the phrase "according to their custom" in the midst of the discussion of how Polycarp was given an opportunity to recant.
Similarly, the patristic scholar John McGuckin writes about another Christian the authorities wanted to capture:
Origen was a marked man. He had evaded previous persecutions by hiding in the houses of the faithful. This time [in the persecution under Decius around the middle of the third century] he was deliberately sought out as the leading Christian intellectual of the age and was arrested. His treatment was specially designed to bring him to a public recantation of the faith. To this end he was tortured with special care, so that he would not die under the stress of his pain. He was chained, set in the infamous iron collar, and stretched on the rack - four spaces, no less, as Eusebius tells his readers, who knew exactly what degree of pain that involved, and how many dislocations of bones and ripping of sinews it brought with it....
The four spaces refers to the ratchet divisions of the Roman torturer's racking machine, and is a near fatal amount that leaves the victim permanently crippled, if not paralyzed....
He was saved time after time, only because the governor of Caesarea had commanded he should not die under the torture before he had publicly denied the faith. This was why he suffered throughout the two years of persecution and was liberated only by the death of the persecutor, Decius, assassinated with his children in 252 after a blessedly short time as emperor. Origen's health had been broken by his ordeals, however. He was by the standards of his age an extremely old man already at sixty-nine, and died from the accumulated sufferings of his imprisonment shortly afterward.
(The Westminster Handbook To Origen [Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004], 22, n. 123 on p. 22, 22-23)
Other examples could be cited, like the offer to Cyprian to recant, which he rejected (Brian Arnold, Cyprian Of Carthage [Scotland: Christian Focus, 2017], 50-52). Christianity originated and grew in a context in which its enemies were aware of the value of recantation and took many steps to provide opportunities for it and made a public issue of it when it happened. Even when the opponents of Christianity didn't offer an opportunity for a recantation, Christians (including the resurrection witnesses) could take the initiative to seek the opportunity, as the parable in Matthew 18 and other examples I've cited illustrate. And if the Christians in question took that sort of initiative, it probably would have been noticed and discussed by the relevant sources. The best explanation for why the apostles other than Judas and the other resurrection witnesses had a widespread reputation of faithfulness is that they were faithful. And that happened in a setting in which they had many opportunities to not be, to avoid suffering by not making the claims they made and taking the leadership positions they took to begin with and to get out of suffering if they changed their mind later. They entered the suffering voluntarily, and they didn't change their mind about it.
Something should be said here about the criterion of embarrassment, since it often comes up in discussions of the suffering of the resurrection witnesses, their faithfulness, and such. Skeptics can't apply a double standard when it comes to the criterion of embarrassment. Sometimes it's suggested that it's too difficult to tell what would and wouldn't have been embarrassing to ancient people, the Christian sources who included allegedly embarrassing material in their accounts might have been making those details up in order to make their accounts seem more credible, and so on. But it will also be suggested at times that records of any recantation of the resurrection witnesses would have been suppressed, so that we shouldn't expect to have any record of the recantations. Why would the information have been suppressed? Because it was embarrassing? But weren't we told that we can't tell what would and wouldn't have been embarrassing? And if purportedly embarrassing elements were added to ancient accounts in an attempt to make the accounts seem more credible, wouldn't that process involve an acknowledgment of the criterion of embarrassment? Why would ancient sources be trying to make their accounts seem more credible by a means that the people of their day didn't recognize? Then there's the fact that both the ancient Christian and the ancient non-Christian sources repeatedly refer to the unfaithfulness of some of the early Christians, including Christian leaders (Judas' betrayal, the Twelve's abandonment of Jesus around the time of the cross, Peter's unfaithfulness in Galatians 2, Mark's unfaithfulness in Acts 15, the apostasy of Demas, the lapsed Christians who are discussed over and over again during later persecutions, etc.). The early Christians, like later ones, would have ranged across the spectrum in terms of their honesty and other characteristics. We do often find some Christians acknowledging their own and their leaders' unfaithfulness in various contexts. It's extremely unlikely that there was some worldwide consensus to suppress evidence of the unfaithfulness of the resurrection witnesses, that none of the evidence for their unfaithfulness or evidence for the suppression effort has surfaced (in spite of all of our advances in archeology, manuscript discoveries, and such, which ancient sources couldn't have anticipated), etc.
In closing, something should be said about the number of witnesses involved. 1 Corinthians 15 refers to hundreds of resurrection witnesses, and there were others (e.g., the women who went to Jesus' tomb), but let's focus on the apostles. Even if one of them recanted and the recantation somehow left no trace in the historical record, we have to consider the likelihood that such a scenario happened twice, three times, etc. Given the number of people involved, it's unreasonable to try to explain the evidence we have by proposing that such a scenario occurred with even half of the apostles, let alone most or all of them.
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