The answer is, there was no Pope. Christians don’t have a Pope, Catholics do.
Baptists, Methodists, etc are flavors of Protestant Christians, which were created out of the lapse of good doctrine in the Catholic church.
So what? Almost all Christian denominations have leaders, by some title or other.
I once knew an ultra-fundamentalist Christian who thought that any church who has priests, minsters, or pastors was a false church.
His church had elders, like the Original and True Christians (or so he said).
Also, his church didn't use crucifixes or crosses. Both were for false churches. He wore a fish pendant, because the fish was the symbol of the Original and True Christians.
The first believers were called Catholic ye universal church ye community of Jesus. That was before they got the exonym Christian.
And yes, they started off with a Pope, Peter, right from the start, the foundation of the Catholic church in 33 AD at Pentecost