Is paul the founder of christianity

In the preface to his 1845 book, Paul: His Life and Works, Baur wrote:

I advanced the assertion which I have since maintained and furnished with additional evidence, that the harmonious relation which is commonly assumed to have been between the apostle Paul and the Jewish Christians with the older apostles at their head, is unhistorical, and that the conflict of the two parties whom we have to recognize upon this field entered more deeply into the life of the early Church than has been hitherto supposed.

More theologians (mostly German and Protestant) pushed through the crack in the door opened by Baur, and soon it was wide open.

The work of two men is worth mentioning here: philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Lutheran theologian Georg Friedrich Eduard William Wrede (1859-1906). Although Nietzsche in The Antichrist (1895) mocked Jesus as an “idiot,” he reserved special hatred for “the Christianity of Paul,R