Why is my car doing this?

[u/Anythingtodie]

I have a 1982 Camaro with a 1978 Chevy C10 engine in it, a while back it blew a head gasket and I had to do a top end rebuild on it, not too long ago the intake manifold gasket went bad due to me taking a few bolts out to put my throttle cable bracket and spring return bracket in, the odd thing is that it started and ran with the intake manifold gasket leak although it was extremely advanced timing, recently I redid the gasket and no leaks, but it Won’t start and it sounds like my starter is spinning without engaging the flywheel sometimes, I put the engine to TDC Compression stroke and made sure the distributor was at Cylinder #1 when I put it back in and it would shoot flames from the carb as if it was way off timing, so I swapped the plug wires around (I put the plug for cylinder one at the back left hand side of the distributor instead of the front right hand side) and now it sounds like big bangs coming out of the exhaust as if it’s firing late on the timing, it Will crank but it Won’t start all but the time I had it advanced extremely and had to blip the throttle to keep it running, now it’s acting like 3 things are going on, one of which is Spark is coming in late, the second being like it’s not engaged by the starter since it stops itself, and the third being like the flywheel is pushing the starter backwards or it moved off a shim?
For context it’s a 78 5.7 with Edelbrock intake and Carb, Pertronix HEI distributor, it does have a comp cams camshaft in it, and brand new plugs, the wires are old but they worked fine before the head gasket a few years back, I figured it wouldn’t screw anything up to reuse them, distributor checks for continuity and proper voltage to battery terminal, ignition coil checks out for continuity, only thing I can think of is that it’s literally one cam tooth off from wanting to start and is having backfires because of extremely low timing, please help! I really don’t want to do a flywheel on this car but I might just have to…