are difficult for me to read, including the Koran and most Jewish apocryphal books:

Most literature concerning Gnosticism bears the same kind of imprint as most modern Xian theology does: You start with the text and naive readings and find that there's little interesting to say. Either you come up with stuff known 1800 years ago or you come up with trivialities (but I repeat myself).

For me, what's interesting is not the naive reading, but how it fits in historically. And especially in Gnosticism, whether the text is supposed to be allegorical or not. That is critical. When I was young, I used to imagine that religion and philosophy 20 centuries ago would have been literal and naive, whereas allegorical readings were a more modern development. Now I think it's the opposite.

As far as Paul being a gnostic, I had never thought so, but have begun to wonder.

Some of his phraseology and ideas and distinctively gnostic. For example, an expression such as "the god of this world" raises the question of whether Paul saw the God of the Torah as a demiurge. His eschatology seems a tad unorthodox when he says that "Christ must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet.” And he had the same mix of public asceticism and theoretical antinomianism that Marcion himself did.

Paul may have not even have been Jewish at all, but an Idumean relative of Herod that had grown up in a Mithraic environment, which would give him a different perspective and less of an adherence to the Law.

There's a lot more to the story than just saying there were different schools of thought. Showing how they developed from each other is key IMO. And even though academics are not usually people of faith, it's still difficult to break from the idea that orthodox Christianity was close to the original version of the faith.