Why are Paul's writings in the Bible?

[The Grand Nudger]

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"?

b-mine.

The trouble is that we know that happened even if there were a boy named paul.  We may as well ask what was so special about the name Drizzt Do'Urden.  Created as a supporting character by R.A. Salvatore, and certainly not historical, it's probably one of the most famous fan fic characters in the genre.  Dracula is similarly well represented.  Both of these characters were created to discuss then-present racial tensions (to very different conclusions, lol) - which is very much a thing irl.  Salvatore based the character off of other characters in other works of fiction (fiction also existing, irl), and Stoker loosely modeled Dracula off a certain historic figure.

Now, I know, I know, we want to say that these examples are known works of fiction and so it's not one for one - full of magic and beasties...but...so is magic book.  The historic paul in the context of biblical studies is not the man himself - but what we think is the core and most consistent of the messaging.  Written by someone other than the historic person paul which we also think existed.  From a copy, or from oral tradition, or from memory, or from knowing him. Or mix and match them all. Nothing we have is believed to have been written by paul.  

Then there's a mirrored question.  We know that the name paul was important.  It's not likely that a single motivation explains every attribution or that there even is an explanation for every attribution (i mean that as an issue of trivia and as a brute fact about attribution).  Issues of historicity are a side gig - because there are other letters that have been at various times attributed to paul (and the historic person paul is believed to have written alot more) but they didn't make it into magic book as we have it and so don't tend to be represented in the possibly historical person of paul even if they were his letters (or a copy, or whatever).

If you wanted a single and parsimonious answer for all of this it's not that there was a historic person named paul. It's that a historic church had historic needs and the historic character of paul serviced them. That's the explanation for every detail of any paul that survived to present day and become a part of magic book, and the ones that didn't, and the ones we custom made to purpose. It's that, more than anything, which makes the search for any historical basis for pretty much any of the biblical characters so difficult.