That a single person did write the 6 unchallenged epistles is beyond reasonable doubt. Let us not forget what “historicity” is., it is NOT “history” Historicity is the historical actuality of persons and events, meaning the quality of being part of history instead of being a historical myth, legend, (see wikipedia)
Paul unlike the apostles or Jesus was a person, he wrote letters. They were (badly) preserved, mixed up and regurgitated. But they show all the hallmarks for being from a single person writing in the mid 1srt century.
Were they from the Saul/Paul figure? we do not know. Were the later gospels based on their hallucinatory accounts mixed with other stories and religions? Absolutely, in my opinion.
He was so influential that people were still forging letters in his name 300 years and more later.
Paul (whatever) was literate, a visionary, a persuasive writer and would have been a powerful figure in the newly emerging cult world of the various “christian” communities.
It must be remembered that in the Roman Middle East and, indeed, in Rome itself, the Jewish religion had a special place. They even had special laws that exempted them from the usual annual sacrifice and taxes ( see Pliny the Younger for evidence of the confusion that caused).
Synagogues were often packed by the curious to hear the history of this strange people who claimed to be have the most powerful God anointing them and, remember Judaism claimed to have the ONLY god in captivity (albeit invisible) behind the curtain of the temple. Curious in itself to a polytheistic society. Also Judaism had the scrolls of Torah in each and every synagogue, all of which allegedly predated the entire Roman and Greek civilisations. Yes they were a curiosity and had special treatment from the early 1st century until their assumption of power at the beginning of the 5th century.
That that proved attractive to a chancer like Paul? I consider it very likely, the one stumbling block? To be “christian” one first had to be a jew (or become a jew) and that process involved ritual bodily mutilation. Again a process that horrified many of the Graeco Roman world who had been brought up on the Platonic versions of the perfection of the human form.
Whoever “paul” was, he defied the Temple at Jerusalem and insisted that gentiles could be “saved” without the assumption of “Jewry” and all that entailed…for men at least.
Paul was not “ordinary” (As Carrier maintains) he was an extraordinary cult leader who bullied and harangued a young cult into future greatness…and no doubt earned a fair few cisterces on his own account whilst doing so.
In short a cunt, but an inspirational cunt all the same. I don’t doubt his existence whoever he was, I doubt his “visions” and his contradictory messages, his motives and his results.