We need to keep in mind that the resurrection witnesses lived past Jesus' lifetime, with John the son of Zebedee apparently living more than half a century past the time of Jesus' death. It's important, then, to remember that we're discussing witnesses of Jesus in this context, not Jesus. It seems that people often confuse categories when these issues come up, since they're so accustomed to thinking in terms of Jesus' lifetime rather than the lifetimes of the witnesses of Jesus. For example, though only a small percentage of eyewitnesses and contemporaries of Jesus lived into the second century, a much larger percentage of eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the resurrection witnesses did.
We also need to remember that there was already an atmosphere of persecution present at the time when Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead. The death that came before his resurrection was not only a form of persecution, but also one involving both Jewish and Roman sources and one directed at a leader of the movement (Jesus). So, that sort of atmosphere of opposition to the leadership of the Christian movement was in place from the start.
Paul refers to himself as a former persecutor of the church in general, without qualification (Galatians 1:13, 1 Corinthians 15:9). Church leaders were among those who suffered or had the potential to suffer under that persecution. And after Paul became a Christian, he was persecuted. Upfront, it's unlikely that he would have been the only church leader, or the only apostle, who was so treated. And we don't have to rely only on that sort of abstract judgment. In 1 Corinthians 4:9-13, Paul refers to the suffering and susceptibility to suffering of the apostles in general, not just himself. That situation didn't consist only of persecution and the potential for it, but persecution and the potential for it were part of what was involved, along with other forms of suffering.
Later references to the suffering of the resurrection witnesses and their willingness to suffer - in the gospels, Acts, the earliest patristic documents, and elsewhere - can't be dismissed just because the sources allegedly are late or because of objections to the historicity of some portions of the documents. See my comments earlier in this post about the lateness issue. Eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the resurrection witnesses lived into the second century. And I've argued elsewhere for the earliness of the Synoptics, Acts, and other relevant sources, such as here. Human testimony is generally reliable, which allows for exceptions that don't overturn the rule. We, including skeptics, depend on such principles to function in our everyday lives, when evaluating claims made by scientists about their scientific experiments, claims skeptics make about their own experiences in life, and so on. When there's such widespread agreement among sources from the first century onward that the apostles and other resurrection witnesses publicly proclaimed a message with the resurrection of Jesus at its foundation and that they did so in a context of significant suffering and potential for suffering, anybody who wants us to reject what those sources reported needs to offer a substantial amount of counterevidence to justify rejecting those reports.
For example, alleging that Luke was wrong about the census mentioned in chapter 2 of his gospel wouldn't justify rejecting what he said about issues related to the suffering of the resurrection witnesses elsewhere in his writings. If an atheist makes a mistake about the year in which an event in American history occurred, I can't use that mistake to justify dismissing his and others' widespread reports about a significantly different subject for which there's no comparable or greater reason for rejecting their testimony. To return to my Luke example, skeptics' rejection of Luke's report about the census is typically based on their interpretation of what Josephus reported. But Josephus was wrong on multiple occasions about multiple issues by the skeptics' own standards. It doesn't follow that they can't trust him elsewhere. If we're supposed to doubt the widespread reports about what the resurrection witnesses said and the context of suffering in which they said it, we need more than appeals to things like supposed mistakes in Luke's census account and an alleged geographical error in Mark. As the New Testament scholar Martin Hengel wrote regarding some colleagues who are overly critical of documents like Mark's gospel:
His [Mark's] 'deficient knowledge' of the geography of Galilee, which contemporary exegetes like to criticize, in fact simply shows up the [latter's] historical incomprehension: without a map it would be difficult even for a man of antiquity like Mark to establish his bearings in a strange area a good seventy miles from his home city…
When I visited my distinguished colleague A. Kuschke (to whom I had dedicated the above article on his seventieth birthday) in Kusterdingen, south-east of Tübingen, we were able to admire Pfrondorf to the north, beyond the Neckar. A colleague who had lived for many years in Tübingen asked me, 'Is that beyond Wankheim?' 'No,' I had to tell him, 'it's in the opposite direction.'…As many and as few mistakes are made in the Gospels as in monographs on the New Testament.
(Studies In The Gospel Of Mark [Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2003], 46, n. 51 on p. 148)
I've said a lot more elsewhere about issues related to the resurrection witnesses' willingness to suffer. Follow the links in the first paragraph in this post, for example.
Right as you do here, I often emphasize willingness to die rather than actual martyrdom. It may even be that John the son of Zebedee died a natural death. But he was out there risking his neck with Peter in the earliest days.
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