Not considering Paul at the moment because it's not his historicity the article's about. But yes, Paul (or the Hellenized Jewish community) is the reason we rem

Not considering Paul at the moment because it's not his historicity the article's about. But yes, Paul (or the Hellenized Jewish community) is the reason we remember Christianity at all, or even have the word "Christian" in our vocabulary. Without Paul it would have been some other messianic religion, maybe the Mithraism of the Roman soldiery, or some collision of Mithraism and Buddhism, or some other prophet(s) from the Empire's outlands. Who knows? But Paul's Hellenization, and just as importantly, that of the Jewish world at the time, is hugely influential, not just for Christianity but Judaism as well. The Book of Luke and Acts, taken together as a single authored unit (which it almost certainly was), as a single example, could be read as a sort of Odyssey, and it actually sort of reads that way even to godless contemporary such as myself. This is really interesting comparing it to the development of Gnosticism across Greek, Judaic, and Christian, how they passed along a philosophic school across faiths. Almost a sort of "meta-Pythagoreanism".