something seen: the sight set before a person's eyes, and in Acts above all an appearance God gives in order to say something
This word names the thing seen, not the act of seeing. It is built from the ordinary Greek verb for seeing, with an ending that points to a result, so it means the picture that lands in front of a person rather than the looking itself. That is why it stretches over a bush that is genuinely burning in front of Moses and a scene that comes to a man asleep, without settling in advance which of the two is in view.
Eleven of its twelve appearances are in Acts, where it is the regular word for how God moves his messengers to their next step. The pattern hardly varies: someone is praying, or asleep, or caught up out of himself; an appearance comes; a voice speaks; the person gets up and does what was said.
- Ananias is sent to the man in Damascus he has been dreading (Acts 9:10).
- Cornelius is told to send for a stranger in another town (Acts 10:3).
- Peter is shown a sheet of animals he has always refused to eat (Acts 11:5).
- Paul is shown a Macedonian begging him to cross the sea (Acts 16:9).
- Paul is told to keep speaking in a city where he expects trouble (Acts 18:9).
Two Greek words stand very close. ὅρασις is about seeing, and so about the look of a thing, while this word is about the thing shown. ὀπτασία puts the weight on someone becoming visible, as when an angel or the risen Christ is seen. The state a person is in gets a word of its own: the trance Peter falls into (ἔκστασις) is the condition, not the content.
Luke is also careful about what this word does not settle. In Acts 12:9 Peter walks out of prison past the guards and assumes he is only seeing one of these appearances rather than something actually happening, which shows the word could cover an inward scene as easily as an outward one. Yet when Jesus tells the three disciples to keep quiet about the mountain, he uses this same word for what they saw, and that was no private daydream.