Origen's Use of Ammonius in His Commentary on John [Part Two]

Work	Passage	Greek textual indicators of Ammonian-style pericope use	Strength as witness for Ammonius pericope use	Rank (1–10)
Origen, Commentarium in Ioannem	6.24.128–6.24.131 (Isaiah/Malachi conflation; attribution; epitome; “beginning of the gospel”)	This is the tightest kind of “unit-boundary / pericope-handling” evidence because Origen is watching the evangelists operate on a bounded citation-complex that functions as a recognizable opening block. He explicitly contrasts (a) John’s placement of “Φωνὴ βοῶντος…” as speech “ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ βαπτιστοῦ” with (b) Mark’s deployment of the same prophetic material as an explicit incipit-formula (“ὡς ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου… ἀναγέγραπται οὕτως”), i.e., the sort of “start-marker” that can serve as an indexable entry-point. He then moves into text-critical segmentation: “Οὐ κεῖται… ἐν τῷ προφήτῃ ‘Εὐθύνατε…’” and proposes a concrete editorial mechanism: John may be epitomizing (“ἐπιτεμνόμενος”) the longer Isaiah line (“Ἑτοιμάσατε… εὐθείας ποιεῖτε…”) into “Εὐθύνατε…”. Finally, he gives the key harmonizing observation that Mark fuses two prophecies from two prophets into one composite and yet labels it “in Isaiah” (“ὁ Μᾶρκος δύο προφητείας… εἰς ἓν συνάγων”). That is precisely the sort of stable, repeatable block (incipit + composite citation + editorial note) that a pericope system presupposes: you can only “index” and “align” if the chunk is treated as a coherent unit with identifiable edges and characteristic wording.	Very strong: Origen is not merely citing—he is treating the prophetic proem as a discrete textual unit, marked by incipit language (“ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου”), and analyzing how each evangelist compresses/expands it. That’s pericope-thinking in miniature.	9/10
Origen, Commentarium in Ioannem	6.24.131–6.28.147 (Prophetic citations; evangelists’ “epitomizing”; sequencing of Pharisee inquiry; synoptic/Lukan-Johannine alignment)	Origen is doing micro-level “pericope mechanics” rather than vague harmonization. He explicitly tracks (a) source attribution of the composite opening citation (Malachi vs “immediately written” material), (b) editorial epitome/abbreviation (“ἐπιτεμνόμενος”, “ἐπιτομή”) in Mark’s prophetic quotation, including the specific omitted segment (“Οὐ παρέθετο… τὸ ‘Ἔμπροσθέν μου’”), and then extends the same technique to Luke’s handling of Isaiah (omissions, substitutions, singular→plural changes, lexical alterations: omitting “πάντα”, changing “εἰς εὐθεῖαν” to “εὐθείας”, rewriting the “τραχεῖαι” clause, dropping “δόξα κυρίου”, etc.). He then anchors narrative ordering with an explicit logical rule (“Ἀκόλουθον… πρῶτον πυθέσθαι, εἶτ’ ἐληλυθέναι”) to align John’s “sent from the Pharisees” interrogation with Matthew’s report of Pharisees/Sadducees coming to baptism, and he repeatedly distinguishes groups as narrative units (Matthew’s two “τάγματα” vs Luke’s single crowd; Pharisees/Sadducees vs the confessing multitudes; grammar shift singular/plural in “καρπὸν/καρπούς”). Finally he defends the procedure: not “out of season” to cite other gospels if the pericope-join has been made correctly (“Μὴ ὑπολάβῃς… ἀκαίρως… εἰ γὰρ καλῶς ἐφηρμόσαμεν…”). All of this presupposes stable, segmentable pericopes that can be aligned by (i) citation-forms and (ii) narrative-logic joins.	Among the strongest kinds of evidence: Origen is explicitly describing how evangelists cut, omit, and rephrase within the same “unit,” and he is explicitly joining Johannine scenes to synoptic scenes by narrative-sequence logic. That is exactly the intellectual posture that makes an Ammonian table workable.	10/10