| Boundary citation | Gospel | Ammonian no. | Ammonian range | Eusebian Canon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mt 13:1 | Matthew | 131 | Mt 13:1–11 | 2 |
| Mt 13:36 | Matthew | 140 | Mt 13:36–53 | 10 |
| Mt 5:14 | Matthew | 32 | Mt 5:14–16 | 2 |
| Jn 1:35 | John | 16 | Jn 1:35–40 | 10 |
Origen’s procedure in the Comm. Matt. unit you isolated is best explained if we assume he is thinking in pre-Eusebian “sectioning” terms—i.e., in the presence (whether on the page, in the margin, or in learned habit) of an Ammonian-style apparatus that makes the Gospel navigable by stable pericope starts. The key is not that Origen ever names Ammonius or cites section numbers. The key is the shape of his citation practice: he repeatedly anchors argument and exegesis at incipits that function as unit-markers, and then treats what follows as an internally coherent block whose seams are not grammatical but documentary.
That is exactly what your boundary-table captures. In the passage under discussion Origen does not merely allude to Matthean imagery; he “parks” on beginnings that correspond to recognized Ammonian units: Matthew 13:1 (Ammonian 131), Matthew 13:36 (Ammonian 140), John 1:35 (Ammonian 16), and (in a different register) Matthew 5:14 (Ammonian 32). What matters is that these are not random prooftexts but entry-points: Mt 13:1 is the narrative launch for the parable discourse (“ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ…,” etc.), Mt 13:36 is the transition into the explanation sequence (“τότε ἀφεὶς τοὺς ὄχλους…,” etc.), and Jn 1:35 is the day-marker that initiates the discipleship vignette (“τῇ ἐπαύριον…,” etc.). Origen’s habit of beginning precisely at such “header-lines” is what you would expect from a reader trained to move through the Gospels by pre-set pericope divisions: the exegete cites the line that the apparatus itself would index as the start of the unit, and the ensuing exposition proceeds as if the unit were already delimited for him.
The internal evidence is strengthened by what Origen does not do. He does not cite Matthew 13:37, 13:38, 13:41–43, etc., as fresh starting points; rather, those lines are treated as interior members of the same explanatory block once Mt 13:36 has been invoked. That is the “apparatus effect”: once the unit is entered, subsequent verses function as within-unit elaboration, not as new textual loci. Likewise, his deployment of Mt 5:14 at a clean unit start (rather than, say, 5:15 or 5:16) looks like the same navigational instinct: he chooses the entry-line that best behaves like a section head. In short, Origen’s Greek citations behave like someone reading with a map in hand—an economy of reference that prefers incipits and treats the remainder as a traversable stretch.
When you set this beside the Greek of Theodore (Letter to Theodore), the contrast is illuminating because Theodore makes the apparatus logic explicit, even flamboyantly so. The author does not merely cite; he narrates his movement through the text in the language of a cross-referencing system. The opening move is programmatic: “Σοὶ τοίνυν οὐκ ὀκνήσω… δι᾽ αὐτῶν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου λέξεων…,” framing the response as an evidentiary procedure executed through Gospel wording. Then comes the unmistakable indexer’s formula: “Ἀμέλει μετὰ τὸ … καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως …” Here “μετὰ τὸ” + incipit and “ἕως” + endpoint perform the work of a section-table: the reader is told where to enter and how far the unit runs. In other words, the author is not only quoting a Gospel; he is specifying a span by reference to its boundary phrases, the very thing an Ammonian apparatus exists to make easy and reproducible.
The same apparatus-consciousness appears again in the metatextual cues that follow. “Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν” is not ordinary quotation-introduction; it is the diction of a compiler aligning textual sequence—“here he brings in, verbatim.” Still more revealing is the technical deployment of “περικοπή”: “Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται τὸ … καὶ πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή.” This is the voice of someone thinking in discrete blocks and their successors: after this comes that, and indeed the whole pericope (i.e., the rest of the unit). The closing navigational marker repeats the same logic: “Μετὰ δὲ τὸ καὶ ἔρχεται εἰς Ἱεριχὼ ἐπάγει μόνον….” Again, “μετὰ δὲ τὸ” + a recognizable incipit is used as a coordinate in a system of sequential control, and “μόνον” underscores selection—only this is appended, nothing more.
So the evidentiary difference is not that Origen lacks the apparatus and Theodore possesses it; rather, Origen’s Greek shows the habitus of sectional reading, while Theodore thematizes the same habit as an argumentative method. Origen signals the apparatus indirectly by consistently choosing pericope incipits (Mt 13:1; Mt 13:36; Jn 1:35; Mt 5:14) and treating the ensuing material as bounded without repeatedly reintroducing fresh anchors. Theodore, by contrast, speaks like someone writing with the canon-table mentality in view: it identifies beginnings (“μετὰ τὸ…”) and ends (“ἕως…”) as coordinates, announces verbatim carry-over (“κατὰ λέξιν”), and names the unit as such (“πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή”). If Origen’s practice is the quiet evidence of an Ammonian apparatus in use, Theodore reads like a performance of that apparatus—making explicit, in Greek, the very operations (entry, span, succession, block identity) that the Ammonian system was designed to standardize.
