Did Paul ever meet Jesus? In the sense most readers mean, no. He never saw ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him teach, never heard him, and was never one of those who walked with him. What Paul claims is narrower, and it is worth setting out exactly.
He claims one meeting, and it came after the crucifixion. He lists it with the others: the risen Christ appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred, then to James, then to all the apostles, “and last of all he appeared to me also.”1 He puts it as a question: “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”2 He calls it a revelation, and says he took his gospel from no man.3 That is the whole of it. Paul gives no place, no date and no witness, and he says nothing of a light or a voice.
The light and the voice come from Acts, which tells the story three times, and the tellings differ. In one, Paul’s companions hear the voice and see no one; in another, they see the light and do not hear the voice.4 The comparison is set out in The three accounts compared, and the road itself in The Damascus road: one vision, three stories.
The verse people raise against this is 2 Corinthians 5:16, where Paul writes that “we once knew Christ according to the flesh, but now we know him so no more.” It speaks of how he regarded Christ, and it does not say that he met him. Paul never describes a conversation with the living Jesus, never repeats his own memory of him, and when he wants a saying of Jesus he cites others.
Acts shows what this meant to the people who were there. When the apostles chose a replacement for Judas, the man had to have been with them “all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John.”5 Paul does not meet that test, and Acts does not claim that he did. By his own account he first went up to Jerusalem three years after his call, stayed fifteen days with Cephas, and saw no other apostle but James.6 The men who had known Jesus were slow to receive him, and A self-appointed apostle asks why.
So the answer has two parts. Paul never met Jesus in his life on earth. And the one meeting he claims has no witness but himself, in a gospel he says he received from no one else. Everything else Paul teaches rests on that.