Regardless of whether or not Jesus existed or if the Gospels are at all accurate, how accepted is it that there was a guy named Paul in the beginnings of the Church who was the driving force in its spread thrugh the Middle East and into southern Europe and Asia Minor? Do historians largely agree that he existed, do they largely agree that he was myth or is there no consensus at all? Is there reliable evidence that he existed as a person regardless of whether or not he was all the New Testament presents him to be? Obviously someone was leading the first century churches. Do we have any solid grip on who those folks may have been?
I wasn’t sure if this was a GQ or a GD but it seems that it has a fairly factual answer.
I have seen dudes dispute Pauls authorship of certain works, but no one seems to doubt he was a real man.
Note the Master Speaks: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_275.html
"Doubts about the historicity of Christ did not surface until the 18th century. In short, whether or not JC was truly the Son of God, he was probably the son of somebody."
Even people who dispute the historicity of Jesus (like Geoge A. Wells – http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Exist-George-Albert-Wells/dp/0879753951/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198152547&sr=1-1 ) seem to accept the historicity of Paul. Probably because, as you say, somebody had to have written the epistles. These are the earliest Christian documents we have. Not all of the letters are believed to have been written by Paul, most notably the Epistle to the Hebrews, which never even suggests internally any Pauline authorship. (I was surprised when that was pointed out to me – it’s always bundled in with Paul’s epistles, so I assumed it was by him. But there no obvious reason to assume that this is the case, even for a True Believer). Some of the other epistles, even though they appear to be by Paul, are seriously doubted by many.
Opinion about Paul is very divergent, some thinking that he completed and extended the beliefs of Christianity, others that he radically changed the course of Christian belief, and others (like Wells) thinking that his personal ideas of Christianity were extremely different from what we think it must have been like… As far as I know, the epistles are the only generally accepted memorials of him we have. We don’t have any items generally accepted as being associated with him (although I have no doubt there are plenty of relics that claim to be). He’s written about in The Acts of the Apostles and quoted in early Church documents. A lot of artistic depictions of him show him as bald, but I don’t think that detail derives from canonical writings (IIRC, Paul describes himself as not good-looking, but doesn’t give specifics.)