I think professors and academics are so used to "high brow" concepts that the vulgarity of every day life (ancient or modern) escapes them. When I read the Church Fathers attack the Marcionites (or "Marcion") it is very "high brow." A list of textual variations in Luke. It sounds so sophisticated. For hundreds if not thousands of years the sophistication of these discussions made us believe in the sincerity of these claims. But this isn't reality. There weren't "two sides" having debates about whether "and" appeared in a sentence or "it" or some other microscopic concern. The microscopic concerns were signs that the gospel in question had something much deeper - the presence of the Apostle Paul in the very gospel narrative.
I know this sounds crazy but there is a nexus of material ranging from Stanley Porter to Adversus Marcionem which suggests that Paul included himself in the gospel narrative. The strongest indicator of this literary device is actually associated with Mark himself where the Cypriot (of all places) and Coptic traditions say that Mark essentially wrote himself in the narrative. Again something completely ignored by the "textual critical" path that we are led into by modern academics. The idea that the evangelist only superficially wrote a narrative about Jesus but were really intending to make the narrative about themselves is ignored because most of the people studying Christianity grew up praying to Jesus Christ since their youth. But I promise you, the Alexandrian tradition thought Paul was the rich youth in Mark.
Just read Stanley Porter with a critical eye or at least a flexible one. Porter suggests that Paul was an eyewitness to the discussion between the rich guy and Jesus. At first glance, it sounds like something a religious fanatic would say rather than a serious scholar. But its not that crazy. It develops as part of a discussion of echoes of the gospels in the letters of Paul. I've always felt that crazy people from the non-believers and crazy people from the believers find common ground on ideas like this. The wishy washy just posit that Paul could have written his letters from "hearing about" what Jesus was teaching. I don't think so. Again vulgarity demands "bald" truths. Do I believe that "average people" would believe Paul if he didn't see Jesus? I don't think so. The fact that the orthodox seem to agree that Paul didn't see Jesus has everything to do with Acts a second century text (even by Clement's standards who thought Luke wrote the Dialogue between Jason and Papiscus).
There were a group of pre-orthodox Christians who believed that Paul was superior to Peter. No one could possibly believe that Paul had more authority than Peter if he didn't interact with Jesus in the way that Peter did in the gospel. It has long been noted that Mark wrote the gospel narrative in such a way to deny Peter's authority. The idea that he did so to simultaneously raise Paul's is another plausibly hypothesis given what ancient writers tell us about the two. All we have to do is identify Paul as the "rich guy" in Mark chapter 10 and it all comes together.
