Catholicism was constructed as a defense against Marcion

What a load of shitty speculation right over there! The claim that Marcion and his followers namely the marcionites wrote the Pauline corpus is very absurd. Marcion was the man who believed that only Paul understood the true message of Christ and rejected the Old Testament and its Jewish god Jehovah completely. So for Marcion, a ship owner of Pontus to convert and arrive at the conclusion of Marcionism the Pauline Epistles must already have been in existence for him to get influenced by Paul and his teachings. Robert Price knows that this version of his view is actually a chicken and the egg problem. Marcion wrote the Pauline letters but for Marcion to get influenced in order to write the Pauline letters the Pauline corpus must have been in existent before Marcion became active.

To tackle this problem he makes an even more absurd claim that Simon Magus was actually Saint Paul of Tarsus. We cannot rely on the information of Simonism from Irenaeus because in a hurry to refute the heretics he took whatever sources that was available to him without checking there credibility and therefore his works are very unreliable. In fact the Gnostic systems which he attributed to Valentinus was not the actual system which Valentinus himself believed in instead his accusations were directed to the later modified systems of Valentinian followers like Heracleon and Ptolemy. So are the clementine homilies which cannot be trusted.

Secondly, one of the other argument of Robert Price is that there are contradictions with in the Pauline Corpus for example comparing Corinthians and Galatians where Paul says that he received his wisdom of Christ while talking with the elders of Jerusalem and on the other hand in Galatians he says that his teachings were mainly derived from his personal revelations of divine and not taught by any human or angel. Robert Price thinks that such contradictions shouldn't be there in a corpus if it was claimed to be written by only one man so he concludes that Marcion wrote Galatians.

What I believe is that instead of Marcion writing Galatians it is more likely that the sentinels of the Catholic church edited Corinthians to make it appear more mainstream and made it leaning towards their own dogmatic beliefs. Suppressing the truth that the relationship between Paul and the church at Jeruasalem was not smooth and suppressing the portrayal of a zeolot anti-Semitic Paul who used to accuse them straight on their faces.

The last idea of Paul being Simon Magus is ridiculous because:

• Paul was a tent maker while Simon was a sorcerer.
• Paul was born and brought up in Tarsus while Simon was from Gitta, a village in Samaria.
• Paul loved the Gentiles and his mission was directed towards the Gentiles but we have no evidence to prove that Simon had any interests in converting and persuading the Gentiles to the ministry of Jesus. Paul's division of teaching one thing to the Jews and another to the Gentiles appears as early as in Romans.
• Paul displayed sensitivity towards a wide range of complex issues but Simon lacked any such sensitivity.
• It was Saul who was under the tutelage of the great Gamaliel and not Simon.
• It was Saul who was struck blind fold on his road to Damascus and not Simon.
• It was Paul who held a Roman citizenship and could fluently read and write Greek and not Simon.

Marcion may have indeed been the first person to collect the different Pauline letters and showed the value of them to the world and his polemic indeed triggered his rivals to establish a different canon of their own by editing and adding verses and by forging new Gospels in the name of Paul which suited to their own agendas. Well if not Marcion I am damn sure Valentinians would have collected and compiled the Pauline Corpus irrespective of whether Marcion collected it or not because no one on earth loved Paul so much other than the Valentinians. Even the Gospel of John has gone through a series of successive editions before making it to the biblical canon of the Catholics because there are many verses in them which are offensive to the Gnostics and equally there are anti-Semitic verses in it which goes to the extreme supporting Gnosticism in full force. All this shows that the New Testament as we have today is not the same version as people saw it two thousand years ago.

The real historical Paul was never really like the Paul of the Catholics as we know today. He was a zealot anti-Semite and more of a Valentinian than a Catholic.