who created christianity

[DeistPaladin]

Which assumes that "Saul/Paul" was any more real than jesus. The more I have examined that question the bigger the doubts become.

The biggest issue I have with Paul is IF he existed, how much have his epistles been tampered with and can we know for sure what exactly he preached?

Scholars suspect that roughly half of his epistles are pseudo-epigraphical. That's a nice way of saying that someone else wrote them and used his name. Such practice was common back then and so already we have cause for doubt.

Next we have who Paul originally was the prophet for: Marcionite Christianity. Paul's epistles, whatever their original form, were originally "discovered" by Marcion. Marcion preached that Jesus was a higher god, separate from and superior to the Jewish god Yahweh. Marcion rejected the entire OT and all things Jewish, preaching instead that Jesus was a god who appeared, fully formed and as an adult, in the temple one day to save us from the austere Jewish god.

So why would Marcion select as his poster boy a prophet who preached a message more compatible with Trinitarian Christianity? Did Marcion not know what Paul wrote? That seems unlikely. Did he hope no one else would know what Paul wrote? This seems unlikely. Were these epistles changed later? Christianity had the means, motive and opportunity to do so.