Why did Saul reject Jesus Christ and the Christians?

Answer 1

The could not see that he was the Messiah

And those Jews who did see Jesus as Messiah are considered to be Christians, not Jews who 'saw the light'. Therefore, your question answers itself.

Answer 2

Because they believed in plenty of Gods and lots and lots of different ones and so when Christianity came to the Romans lots and lots of people converted to it and so no one worshiped the Roman Gods because it was going against their new religion of only having one God so the government was angry because they stopped making sacrifices to their Gods because of what the Savior Jesus Christ so the Christians were persecuted for hundreds of years until finally it had grown into becoming Rome's official religion.

Answer 3

A New Testament perspective:Saul (originally) rejected Christianity for the same reason that all the "devout Pharisees" rejected Jesus; His teachings exposed their pompous hypocrisy and threatened their grip on religious power over the common people.

See Matthew 23 for Jesus' scathing indictment of the Pharisees (who had been seeking to kill Him since He healed a man's withered hand on a Sabbath, as recorded in chapter 12), then note what the Apostle Paul writes about his "former conduct in Judaism" in Galatians 1, and the affirmation that he himself was, "concerning the law, a Pharisee," in Philippians 3.

Before the risen Christ appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus, he had the same general attitude toward Jesus and Christians as any other Pharisee. His zeal is what set him apart, urging him into active persecution of Christians in defense of Mosaic Law (Acts 26:9-11), which he carried out with "all good conscience before God" (Acts 23:1).

Answer 4

Saul/ Paul was shunned by (Christians) believers of Jesus because he was known as a great persecutor of believers. He was on his way to Damascus to arrest believers when Jesus stopped him on the road and turned him into a believer.

Non-Christians did not like Paul because he was a believer in Christ. Christ tells us in The Bible that we Christians will be hated because He (Jesus) was hated. Many persons do not want to confront their sin and so they remain hostile to Christianity.

Answer 5

Paul himself provides very little information about why he persecuted the early Christians or how he came to believe that he was called to be the apostle to the gentiles. He never mentions any divine vision that led to his conversion; in fact his epistles seem to have ruled this out.

Acts of the Apostles, written decades after Paul's death, tells of the young Saul approving of the stoning of Stephen and, although not man enough to participate, holding the cloaks of those who took part in the stoning. There is an implied motive, as he later obtained permission from the priests in Jerusalem to travel to Damascus to persecute the Christians there. It also provides three parallel but different stories in which Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus.

There are many problems in the account given in Acts of the Apostles. In his epistles, Paul indicates that he had been unknown in the region of Cilicia, yet Acts gives Tarsus as his home town. The story of the trial and stoning of Stephen has surprising parallels to the story of the crucifixion of Jesus in Luke's Gospel and to the stoning of James. We even find that while Paul himself never mentions having been known as Saul, Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews) mentions a Saulus who led a riot in Jerusalem after the stoning of James. According to Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament), we can never verify the martyrdom or even existence of Stephen. The Jerusalem priests had no authority in Damascus and were unlikely to have placed themselves in the position of asserting a claim to authority that would be ignored in Damascus. The accounts of Paul's conversion appear to have been based on the ancient play of Euripedes called the Bacchae - in other words, they were not genuine records of Paul's conversion. Thus, much of the information we receive from Acts of the Apostles may not be entirely reliable.

We can certainly speculate why Saul, or Paul, initially rejected the Christians and why he converted to their cause, and such speculation could well be close to the truth. But speculation it must remain.