Origen's Use of Ammonius in Commentary on Matthew [Part Five]

Work	Passage	Greek textual indicators of Ammonian-style pericope / unit use	Strength as witness for Ammonius-style unit thinking
Origen, Commentary on Matthew	11.2–11.4 (Feeding of the Five Thousand; Matt 14:16–21, with the bridge to 14:22)	Origen is operating with a bounded narrative block and repeatedly treats it as a retrievable “unit” rather than a continuous-run text. The unit is anchored by pericope-trigger lines treated as governing incipits: «Δότε αὐτοῖς ὑμεῖς φαγεῖν» and the inventory response «οὐκ ἔχομεν ὧδε εἰ μὴ πέντε ἄρτους καὶ δύο ἰχθύας». He then narrates the internal “mechanics” as a fixed pericope-sequence (λάβων → ἀναβλέψας → ηὐλόγησε → κλάσας → ἔδωκε), i.e. he is reading the pericope by stable action-chain rather than by loose allusion. Most diagnostic is the explicit four-Gospel collation inside one story: «παρὰ τῷ Ματθαίῳ καὶ τῷ Μάρκῳ καὶ τῷ Λουκᾷ… ὁ δὲ Ἰωάννης μόνος…» and the way he extracts micro-variants as interpretive levers (John alone: «κριθίνους»; John’s framing: not “we have,” but «ἔστι παιδάριον ὧδε ὃς ἔχει…»). He then aligns the reclining-order detail across parallels as if reading against a harmonized dossier: Mark’s «συμπόσια συμπόσια… πρασιαὶ πρασιαὶ… ἀνὰ ἑκατὸν καὶ πεντήκοντα» vs Luke’s «κλισίας ὡσεὶ ἀνὰ πεντήκοντα», explaining why those are there (τάγματα/graded feeding), while Matthew supplies the simpler base narrative (recline “ἐπὶ τοῦ χόρτου”). The end of the unit is also treated as symbolically “counted” and thus structurally integral (δώδεκα κόφινοι ↔ δώδεκα φυλαί), another sign Origen is reading the pericope as a designed whole. There is no explicit Matthean “other recension” note here (no “κατὰ τινὰ τῶν ἀντιγράφων”), so the strongest “Ammonius shows a different Matthew than my copy” signature is absent; instead the signature is synoptic collation within a single pericope.	High (unit-thinking), Medium-High (synoptic-table habit) — This passage is one of Origen’s clearest demonstrations of pericope-as-indexed-block reading: he treats the Feeding as a discrete unit with an internal action-chain, then explicitly collates Matthew/Mark/Luke/John and interprets their small differences as meaningful (barley; “boy has” vs “we have”; hundreds/fifties ordering). It supports Ammonius-style unit thinking strongly, but it does not by itself show the “Ammonius/source has a different Matthew reading than Origen’s recension” phenomenon that makes 12.15 especially probative.