First I have to thank Chris Albert Wells for his thorough and thoughtful open letter to me. Not only that he grasps and highlights the main points that I was trying to make, he also has seen the one big gap which I had seen in the past, but not addressed yet, as I had not worked through all Pauline Epistles and, therefore, was not in a position to answer his open letter yet.
Now that I have just published the Concordance of the precanonical and canonical New Testament, have worked through the Pauline Epistles and the rest of the canonical New Testament, have finished the reconstruction of the precanonical Paul and almost finished the introduction to this reconstruction, I have posted a preliminary answer to his open letter which I am detailing in the introduction to the reconstruction.
Here the short answer that I published on his academia.edu site:
Dear Chris, thanks so much for this open letter to which I am certainly going to reply. Your thorough article honours me and shows that in most elements we are in full agreement. The sting that you mention I had noticed of course, and you are right that I have neither highlighted it nor repsonded to the question that you raise. My short answer which I will need to detail - and you will see these in the upcoming reconstruction volumes of Paul's Letters in the Marcionite collection which I have just finished and for which I am writing the introduction at present - is that, again, our views are not too far: When I am talking about "authorship" of Marcion's Gospel, I had noted that he is not a Shakespeare, but rather somebody who collects and gathers material which he then digests and redacts. In case of the Gospel, a good amount of oral material, perhaps also written, but no-name material. Giving his account the name of "Euanggelion" is already an hommage to Paul and makes Paul present as the authority behind this text, a first reason, why implicitly he is in the Gospel and totally absent. However, the material itself does not seem to have had any explicit relation to Paul, and in this sense we might question even more whether Paul was a historical figure. Again, I would side with you that for Paul all that Marcion had was, again, material, perhaps some written, in the meantime having studied the letters, rather oral material. Paul is referred to in this material, that is why Marcion publishes the letters under his name. The historical information in it, however, is faint, and just as with Jesus, the Paul story might go back to Marcion.
There is another sting which you have not mentioned. Just as the "historical Paul" is absent from the Gospel, so is the "historical Jesus" absent from Paul. However, what both these sets of writings have in common is that they use history to de-historisize divine salvation, and I agree again with you on the eschatologically hellenized nature of both accounts.
After having done the full research on Marcion's Paul - and recently published a "Concordance of the precanonical and the canonical New Testament", it became clear to me that Marcion is as much an author/redactor of the Jesus- as of the Paul-material. Both sets share much of their lexic and semantic which goes as far as the use of small words, grammar ... The two texts derive from the same hand and mind, the differences (incl. the mutual absence of the protagonists) is due to the material to which Marcion remained faithful.
