Why are Paul's writings in the Bible?

[Bucky Ball]

The historicity of Paul is basically a non-issue. It really has no bearing on either the truth or modern condition of Christianity. In that sense, he's a lot like Jesus.

Boru

Well, yeah, a historical Paul should be a non-issue. It's also a more parsimonious view than to say that there was never a man by the name of Paul who wrote/authorized at least some of the epistles in his name, because then you'd have to ask what the motivation here is then to just attribute these epistles to a fictional character. I can understand later works attributed to Paul being pseudepigraphical due to his later popularity, but every single epistle in his name? What was so special about the name "Paul"?

There are at least three philosophies evident in the letters of Paul.  
Once the "letter writing" under any name began, and became recognized as "authoritative", this one happened to be Paul, 
that alone would be good enough to fake letters by a "Paul".