optanomai

This is the half of the Greek verb "to see" that the New Testament uses for the future. When a writer wants to say "you will see" or "they will see," this is the form that shows up, so almost all of these uses look ahead to something a person is going to lay eyes on.

Because it so often points forward, it gathers around the great things people are promised they will one day witness: the Son of Man coming in glory, and above all God himself. "The pure in heart will see God" uses this word, and so does the promise that one day God's people will look on his face. That gives the plain act of seeing a weighty, hopeful edge in many verses, even though the word itself just means to perceive with the eyes.

The same word also lends itself to a common turn of speech: "you will see to it," meaning the matter is now your concern and your responsibility. Pilate uses it when he washes his hands of Jesus, and the Roman official Gallio uses it to brush off a dispute. The literal idea of looking at something shades into the sense of dealing with it yourself.

When this verb takes its passive shape, it flips from "see" to "be seen," and the regular way to translate it into English is "appeared." The one who appears is the grammatical subject: an angel appeared to Zechariah, Moses and Elijah appeared on the mountain, the risen Jesus appeared to Peter. The person who does the looking is named with a simple "to": he appeared to them.

This is the word the earliest church used for the resurrection appearances. Paul's list in First Corinthians, that Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred, then to Paul himself, leans on this verb again and again, and it became something close to a fixed term for those events.

The word does not, by itself, settle what kind of seeing took place, whether an ordinary physical sighting or a vision granted from heaven. It simply states that the figure became visible to the people named. Signs in the sky in Revelation, a vision of a man from Macedonia, and tongues like fire at Pentecost all "appear" with this same word.