He is said to have met Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus, not Jesus as a physical man, the Jewish sage who wandered and taught as a Jew, albeit an enlightened Jewish sage, and was followed by others in their physical being. And Paul didn’t ‘become a Christian’. He chose a Gentile name and founded a religion, a church, whose members began to be called ‘Christians’ some forty to fifty years after the earliest letter Paul wrote to followers of the Church he founded.

Why he decided to stop persecuting those who followed the Way Jesus taught to follow is another question in itself.

As your profiles says, ‘We do not know what we do not know’.