Marcion of Sinope, a wealthy shipowner, arrived in Rome around 140 CE, donated 200,000 sesterces to the church, and in 144 was expelled and refunded for teaching two gods: the just, wrathful creator of the Jewish scriptures, and the good, unknown Father revealed by Christ. His Antitheses laid the contradictions side by side, the old God's eye-for-eye against the new God's other cheek. His response to scripture was editorial: he published a fixed collection, one gospel, a shortened Luke, plus ten Pauline letters, with the Jewish scriptures and their interpolations cut, the first closed Christian canon on record. The Roman church's answer, over the next century, was its own bigger canon: the four gospels and expanding letter collection exist partly because Marcion forced the question of which books count.
The folk Marcion is the first great textual editor of the West: faced with two incompatible portraits of God, he did not harmonize, he cut, declaring the violent deity a different person and the violent passages the lesser God's memoirs. The church called this mutilation of scripture; Marcion called it purification, and his knife-work has the archive's grim respect: he was the only ancient reader who took the contradictions seriously enough to act on them. Every modern red-letter edition, every Jefferson Bible, every scripture minus the parts we dislike, is Marcion's method, the Antitheses with better production values.
The claim: the archive's sharpest Marcion detail is the refund, the church returning 200,000 sesterces to keep its doctrine clean, the one transaction in the record where orthodoxy chose principle over capital, and Marcion's counter-move, building a parallel church with the returned capital, inventing the rival-institution playbook: when the house will not change, buy the lot next door. Verdict: the documented facts support the playbook reading, and the archive's verdict is double: the canon he forced became Christianity's spine, and the two-gods doctrine he died for became its most persistent ghost, every generation's this cannot be the same God moment being Marcion's Antitheses reopened. He lost the doctrine and won the format. The Bible you hold is, in table of contents, his defeat, and in structure, his invention. The sesterces bought both.
If the first Christian canon was compiled by the heretic who deleted the Old Testament, whose table of contents is the Bible, and why did the church copy it?