What was the point of Christ coming to earth and calling disciples and teaching them; only to ultimately choose a guy who never even met him on earth and persecuted the Church to be the most influential Apostle? Couldn’t Christ have just appeared to him without the whole suffering and crucifixion part?
Well, you have two things: you have the Teaching and you have the Sacrifice. An agnostic probably isn’t going to be able to appreciate the difference, but if all that was needed was a Sacrifice, Jesus could have allowed Herod to have killed him when he was an infant, and he wouldn’t have needed to hang around for 33 years on earth. So, obviously, something important happened during those 33 years. While we don’t know specifically what 30 of those years were spent doing (unless you turn to private revelation, beyond the scope of this conversation), you know the last three years were spent in public ministry. Ergo, both his three years of Teaching were important, and his Sacrifice was important.
What was the effect of the Persecution of the Early Church? It forced early Christians to distribute themselves throughout the world as they fled from their persecutors. In a world where travel was a difficult hardship, and in a world where people didn’t have a lot of extra money and weren’t necessarily the most mobile— it was an effective way of having the exact opposite effect that the persecutors wished. Rather than stamping out Christianity, it distributed it throughout the Roman Empire, and from there, to the rest of the world.
Did Paul never meet Christ? There are at least three instances where he did. The first, of course, was on the road to Damascus, where, even though he only saw brightness, he heard Jesus’ voice, which identified itself as “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.” (And, incidentally, he can notice that he had also said, “Why are you persecuting me?” rather than “Why are you persecuting my followers?” and “Whom you are persecuting” rather than “Whose people you are persecuting.”)
The second was after he had received his sight, and he was praying in the temple–
17 “When I returned to Jerusalem and was praying at the temple, I fell into a trance 18 and saw the Lord speaking to me. ‘Quick!’ he said.‘Leave Jerusalem immediately, because the people here will not accept your testimony about me.’
19 “‘Lord,’ I replied, ‘these people know that I went from one synagogue to another to imprison and beat those who believe in you. 20 And when the blood of your martyr Stephen was shed, I stood there giving my approval and guarding the clothes of those who were killing him.’
21 “Then the Lord said to me, ‘Go; I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’ ”
and the third time was in prison–
11 The following night the Lord stood near Paul and said, “Take courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome.”
If I recall, there’s at least one or two other passages that indicate Paul might have (a) been a stigmatic, or at least (b) participated in a very real way in Jesus’ Passion, a la Padre Pio or some of the other mystics.
