This is what the Catholics have to say about
Paul and his teachings:
''Paul, in other words, was a master synthesizer of wildly divergent beliefs, the better to gain him a wide following.
Wrede was an ardent practitioner of historical criticism who argued, in The Messianic Secret (1901), that Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah. The Gospel of Mark, Wrede believed, made Jesus out to be a secret Messiah who was simply a teacher and miracle worker. In his book Paulus (1907) Wrede wrote there was "an enormous gulf between this man and the Pauline Son of God," and that Paul’s belief in "a celestial being" and "a divine christ" prior to his belief in Jesus resulted in Paul becoming "the second founder of Christianity." He further argued that Paul, although a Jew, constructed a theology that was mostly Hellenistic in character.
Newer Variations on the Theme
These same basic lines of argument have been explored further in recent decades by authors intent on demonstrating that if Paul was the "founder" or "creator" of Christianity, then Jesus was not the Incarnate Son of God. A good example on the popular level is Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997), by biographer A.N. Wilson, which portrays Paul as a complex and enigmatic mythologizer. "The genius of Paul and the collective genius of the ‘early church,’" Wilson states, "which wrote the twenty-seven surviving books we call the New Testament, was to mythologize Jesus." Because Paul was well-educated and traveled, he "had a richer language-store, a richer myth-experience, than some of the other New Testament writers, whose mythologies were limited to Jewish liturgy or folk-tale."
