| Comm. Matt. | Gospel Reference | Ammonian Section | Canon | Boundary Function | Greek Incipit / Marker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11.1 | Mt 14:15 (ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης…) | §147 | I | Start of pericope (Feeding of the Five Thousand) | Ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης προσῆλθον αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ |
It is at least plausible, on the Greek evidence, that Origen is navigating by an Ammonian-style pericope grid at the point where he (re)enters the feeding narrative at Matthew 14:15, but the witness is intrinsically modest because his language can be fully explained by ordinary commentarial practice without positing any apparatus. The best way to state it is that Origen’s Greek is compatible with silent use of an Ammonian tool, while the Greek of To Theodore is written as if the tool itself has been made the topic.
The strongest single datum in Origen is the way he chooses the incipit and treats it as a hinge. At Comm. Matt. 10.25 he does not drift into the feeding story by citing an internal phrase; he resets by introducing the narrative with a resumptive formula and then quotes the opening line, “ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης προσῆλθον αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ …,” i.e. the point at which Matthew’s story turns from general healing (14:14) to the disciples’ prompting and the feeding action proper (14:15ff.). That is exactly the kind of “entry-point verse” a pericope apparatus is designed to supply: a stable beginning that allows one to find and treat the episode as a unit. Origen’s subsequent procedure reinforces that impression. Once he has entered at the incipit, he works forward inside the episode and does not keep re-announcing fresh beginnings; the internal citations function as interior lemmata, not as new “starts.” If one is looking for behavioral traces of a pericope system, that asymmetry—careful marking of the entry-point, relative silence about interior seams—is the right shape.
Comm. Matt. 11.1 strengthens this only in a very particular way. Origen opens the new book by repeating the same incipit again (“Ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης …”), then immediately expands it allegorically (the “evening” as “ἐπὶ συντελείᾳ τοῦ αἰῶνος,” with the citation “ἐσχάτη ὥρα ἐστίν”). On the one hand, the repetition can be read as consistent with apparatus-driven reading: the incipit is treated as the header of the unit, the line you return to when you re-enter the same documentary block. On the other hand, this is also a normal literary convenience in a multi-book commentary: a new book can reopen by restating the lemma already under discussion, especially when the author wants the reader to hear the narrative phrase anew as a cue for a new layer of interpretation. The Greek itself does not force the apparatus hypothesis; it merely fits it. If anything, the duplication shows that Origen’s “boundary awareness” is not expressed by explicit boundary talk but by lemma management: he uses the incipit as a textual anchor and then keeps interpreting.
That is the point where the contrast with To Theodore becomes decisive, because To Theodore does not merely behave as though pericopes exist; it verbalizes the mechanics of pericope-navigation. The phrase “Ἀμέλει μετὰ τὸ … καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως …” is an overt boundary formula: it explicitly names a starting incipit (“μετὰ τὸ ἦσαν δὲ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ …”) and an ending limit (“καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως, μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἀναστήσεται”). That is not just “now the story continues”; it is a way of describing a delimited textual block as a block. The same is true of “Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν,” which advertises the transition to verbatim quotation as an operation performed on a bounded source, and of “πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή,” which explicitly labels what follows as a unit. The repeated “μετὰ δὲ τὸ … ἐπάγει μόνον” continues the same documentary stance: the gospel is treated as a chain of segmentable items, each identifiable by incipit, and the author is telling you where the segment begins and how far the quotation goes.
Origen, by contrast, never speaks that way here. He does not say “κατὰ λέξιν,” he does not delimit with “ἕως,” he does not name “πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή,” and he does not frame his citation as a demonstration of how a text is indexed. His transition language (“Μετὰ τοῦτο φησὶν ὁ λόγος” in 10.25) is syntactically ordinary, not documentary; it marks narrative succession rather than bounding a textual excerpt. Even in 11.1, where the incipit is repeated, the repetition is immediately absorbed into allegory rather than being used to define an excerpt’s limits. In short, Origen’s Greek looks like an exegete moving through narrative lemmata; To Theodore looks like an author handling a segmented text as an object, and drawing attention to the segmentation.
So is Origen’s introduction of Matthew 14:15 (and its repetition at 11.1) a stronger or weaker witness than To Theodore for the use of Ammonius? It is weaker as an “objective” proof of apparatus use, because the same Greek can be explained without any apparatus at all, and because the language does not advertise boundary-setting operations. It is stronger only in a narrower, behavioral sense: if one already grants the existence of a pericope-indexing culture, Origen’s habit of re-entering at a stable incipit and treating what follows as a continuous unit is exactly the sort of silent practice such an index would encourage. But it remains circumstantial. To Theodore is explicit about incipit-based segmentation and the management of beginnings and ends; Origen is not. The contrast is therefore best stated as follows: Origen’s Greek provides a compatible, indirect trace of pericope-guided navigation at Matthew 14:15, while To Theodore provides direct, self-conscious pericope language—language that reads not merely as use of an apparatus, but as discourse about the apparatus’ function.
