My knowledge of Greek is, shall I say, very limited.

But I can say that even a really rudimentary knowledge of the fundamentals (the alphabet, basic grammatical categories and constructions), without even memorizing vocabulary or morphology, will give you some truly useful ability to access the text in Greek, insofar as, if you want to see what is going on in a verse, you can look at the Greek and–slowly, tediously, with dictionary and grammar in hand–pick it apart. That’s not generally how you’d want to read a text, but it can still be useful. So, for example, if you want to be able to check to see if Mark is using the same word in two different verses, or whether the translation you happen to be using is suggesting a link that isn’t actually in the text, you have the tools to check.

That is especially true today, when you are talking about a text as heavily studied as the NT: You can get a thorough linguistic analysis of every verse of the NT for free online, which will give you the dictionary form of each word, and parse the declined/conjugated form as it appears in the text–basically it does all the stuff for you that requires memorization.

I’m not saying such a limited knowledge is what you should aim for–certainly you will need a far far stronger command of the language if you wish to go into Scripture scholarship. But it is perhaps an encouragement: as far as access the to text of the NT, even a really basic knowledge of the language will still be a huge step up from being stuck entirely depending on translations.

I guess my point is not to be discouraged; Greek is a difficult language that takes years of hard work to master, but you don’t need to memorize every verb form and be able to read Demosthenes without a dictionary in order to start deriving real benefit from studying it.

Grieving people frequently have waking hallucinations of their departed loved ones. ** you do not have permission to see this link **; these are called “post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences”. The frequency of such experiences is, I understand, related to the trauma and guilt associated with the loss of the loved one; the experiences are often “healing and transformative”.

Now look: Jesus had an inner circle of 12, plus who knows how many groupies. Seeing him (or just knowing of his being) brutally executed would certainly have been traumatic. It also seems very likely to me that they would have felt significant responsibility.

So it seems to me extremely likely–just given what we know about ordinary, natural phenomenon of people thinking they have seen departed loved ones–that several of them would have had such a vivid, waking experience of him. In fact, given what we know, it would be shocking if some of them didn’t have some such experiences of him after the crucifixion.

Now if you sprinkle in just a touch of these people being very religious, then it wouldn’t take much for them to take these experiences as veridicial.

Paul is trickier–since he wasn’t an intimate of Jesus. But that’s where I’m especially inclined to follow the path Stephen suggest above: Was Paul already engaged in a form of Jewish mysticism that cultivated visionary experiences? If he was, that would go a long way to explaining how he had a vision of Jesus that converted him.

Anyway, if you ask which individuals can we reasonably suspect probably had such an experience of Jesus, based on what survives in the NT: I think you end up with Mary Magdalene, James, Peter, and Paul (there could well of course have been more). Set Paul aside, because he was likely a mystic of some sort. That leaves three: Mary, Peter, James, which is fewer than we would have expected.