It could easily be true both that (e.g.) nothing like Christianity would exist without Jesus, and that Christianity wouldn’t have developed into the hugely impactful thing it is now without Paul. In some sense all the credit or blame for that goes to both of them: take away either of them and you have no impactful institution at all.
Of course none of that applies to people whose (it would seem) highly impactful work didn’t create institutions but “merely” contributed hugely to existing ones, or perhaps helped knock them down. Gauss, Wittgenstein and Gödel are all in that category.
It could easily be true both that (e.g.) nothing like Christianity would exist without Jesus, and that Christianity wouldn’t have developed into the hugely impactful thing it is now without Paul. In some sense all the credit or blame for that goes to both of them: take away either of them and you have no impactful institution at all.
Of course none of that applies to people whose (it would seem) highly impactful work didn’t create institutions but “merely” contributed hugely to existing ones, or perhaps helped knock them down. Gauss, Wittgenstein and Gödel are all in that category.