| Gospel | Boundary-verse Origen actually cites (Comm. Matt. 11.4–7) | Ammonian § (from your dataset) | Canon | Ammonian range (dataset) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew | Mt 4:12 | 18 | 4 | Matthew 4:12 |
| Matthew | Mt 5:1 | 24 | 10 | Matthew 5:1 |
| Matthew | Mt 15:24 | 158 | 5 | Matthew 15:24 |
| Matthew | Mt 15:29 | 160 | 6 | Matthew 15:29–39 |
In Origen the “Ammonian” claim lives or dies on what the Greek is doing at the level of navigation. What matters is not whether Origen can quote the Gospels accurately (everyone can), but whether his discourse exhibits the tell-tale habits of an excerpting reader who is moving between delimited units—units stable enough to be indexed, cross-compared, and re-entered as self-contained “sections.” In the Greek of the Commentary on Matthew (as you framed it earlier), the relevant evidence is not a single “Ammonius” keyword but a cluster of procedural signals: Origen repeatedly treats particular incipits as hinges, and he does so with a consistency that looks like work done against a pericope apparatus rather than against an undifferentiated continuous roll of text.
The strongest kind of internal signal is a practice of citing by incipit and then treating what follows as an already-known extension. Origen’s characteristic way of “parking” an argument on a narrative hinge—then resuming, re-entering, or re-framing from that hinge—maps naturally onto an indexed segmentation system. When a commentator repeatedly begins from a verse that functions as a boundary marker (a scene-shift, a new episode, a discourse onset), and when the surrounding discussion presumes that the reader can locate and verify the unit quickly, the procedure is more consonant with a sectioned Gospel than with a merely memorized narrative flow. Your reduced boundary table isolates exactly this kind of hinge behavior: Mt 4:12 (a transition into Galilean ministry), Mt 5:1 (the Sermon’s incipit), and (in your dataset) Mt 15:24 and Mt 15:29 as discrete “section starts” rather than arbitrary mid-stream lemmata. The point is not that these are the only boundaries Origen uses, but that when his argumentation keeps re-anchoring itself at such incipits, he is acting like a reader working with a segmented text. The Greek mechanics that typically accompany this in Origen are formulaic resumptives (“μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα…,” “ἔπειτα…,” “ἐντεῦθεν…,” “ἐφεξῆς…,” “ἕως…”) and lemma-style anchoring (a short citation functioning as the address of a larger block). Those are precisely the kinds of micro-moves an Ammonian system is designed to support: it gives you stable addresses, and it makes “resume from here” a practical method rather than a rhetorical flourish.
By contrast, the Letter to Theodore passage you quote makes the segmentation logic explicit—and therefore offers a different, in some respects stronger, kind of witness to the existence of an apparatus-shaped reading practice. The language is relentlessly procedural. Clement (or the authorial voice of the letter) frames the response as a refutation “δι᾽ αὐτῶν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου λέξεων” (48–49): “I will answer… by means of the Gospel’s own wording, exposing the falsified things.” That is already the posture of a textual verifier, not simply a preacher. Then comes the key navigation syntax: “Ἀμέλει μετὰ τὸ ἦσαν δὲ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ ἀναβαίνοντες εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα, καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως, μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἀναστήσεται” (49–50). This is not ordinary citation. It is a set of directions. “Ἀμέλει” (“never mind / anyway / take it as given”) marks the move as procedural; “μετὰ τὸ …” gives an incipit; “καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς” presupposes a continuous run; “ἕως …” sets a terminus. In other words, the author is not merely quoting; he is instructing Theodore how to traverse a defined stretch of text bounded by two anchor phrases. That is exactly how one talks when the text is already compartmentalized in the reader’s habits, whether by marginal section numbers or by some other stable segmentation practice.
The same apparatus-like mentality appears again at line 65–66: “Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται τὸ καὶ προσεπορεύοντο αὐτῷ Ἰάκωβος καὶ Ἰωάννης καὶ πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή.” Two things matter here. First, “ἕπεται” (“it follows”) is a linking verb that conceptualizes the Gospel not as a free narrative stream but as a chain of attachable units: after these things comes X. Second, the author can summarize the continuation as “πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή,” explicitly naming the chunk as a pericope-sized unit. That noun is not proof of Ammonius by itself, but in this context it is proof of a pericope-conscious reading: what follows can be designated as a bounded whole, and the reader is expected to recognize it as such. The letter repeats this navigational style once more: “Μετὰ δὲ τὸ καὶ ἔρχεται εἰς Ἱεριχὼ ἐπάγει μόνον…” (68–70). Again: “μετὰ δὲ τὸ” + incipit; then a note about what is added; again the sense that text can be located by start-phrases and controlled by “after X comes Y.”
So how do these two bodies of evidence compare as witnesses to Origen’s use of Ammonius specifically?
The Theodore passage is the cleaner witness to an apparatus-shaped practice, because its Greek is overtly indexical. It tells you how to find, how far to read, what follows, what does not occur, and it does so with technical linking language: “μετὰ τὸ…,” “τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως…,” “Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν…,” “Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται…,” “πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή,” “ἐπάγει μόνον.” That cluster is hard to explain as mere rhetorical ornament. It reads like an editor or verifier working with a navigable text.
Origen, by contrast, is typically less explicit in the wording you can cite. He more often behaves like someone using an apparatus than he declares that he is. That makes the inference to Ammonius weaker as a strictly philological proof, even if it remains historically plausible. You can argue that Origen’s procedure—anchoring repeatedly at hinge-incipits (Mt 4:12; 5:1; and the other boundary-style points you have isolated), treating those incipits as lemmatic addresses, and moving among parallels—fits the affordances of an Ammonian system. But “fits” is not “confesses.” Unless Origen’s Greek includes the same kind of direction-giving syntax (the “μετὰ τὸ… καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως…” pattern, or explicit “ἕπεται” / “περικοπή” framing used as navigational commands rather than descriptive labels), the evidence remains circumstantial: strong for a segmented reading culture, weaker for attributing that segmentation to Ammonius in particular.
That difference matters for your final question. As a witness to Origen’s use of Ammonius, the Theodore style is, in one sense, stronger—because it shows the discourse register of an apparatus user in the open. But it is also a different kind of witness: it does not speak to Origen’s habits directly; it shows that a Clementine voice can talk as if Gospel text is navigated by incipit-to-terminus directions and pericope-units. Origen’s own Greek, as you are presenting it, yields a subtler but potentially more direct kind of witness: not explicit instructions, but repeated lemma-anchoring on boundary incipits that correspond to section starts in your Ammonian dataset. The methodological upshot is that Theodore gives you clearer Greek markers of an apparatus mentality (“μετὰ τὸ… τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως… ἕπεται… περικοπή”), whereas Origen gives you a pattern of practice that is compatible with an Ammonian apparatus but requires an inference. If you are asking strictly “which is the stronger witness to Origen’s use of Ammonius,” the answer is: Theodore is stronger evidence for the type of navigational culture that makes Ammonius intelligible; Origen is the more relevant witness for Origen, but (on Greek grounds alone) the claim “Origen is using Ammonius” remains weaker unless you can point to comparable direction-syntax in his text or to explicit section-style citation behavior beyond ordinary lemmata.
One final philological point sharpens the contrast. Theodore repeatedly juxtaposes verification language with navigation language: “κατὰ λέξιν” (50–51), “οὐκ εὑρίσκεται” (67–68), “ψεύσματα… φαίνεται καὶ ἔστιν” (71). Those are the idioms of a reader checking a manuscript against claims—precisely the activity for which an apparatus of sectionalized excerpts and parallels would be useful. Origen certainly does verification and textual argument, but unless his Greek similarly foregrounds “after this incipit… up to that terminus…” as a method of locating the passage under dispute, you have to argue from structural behavior rather than from explicit navigational phrasing. In short: Theodore reads like someone holding the text open and guiding another reader through bounded units; Origen (as usually) reads like someone who has the text open and is extracting lemmata for exegesis. The former is more obviously “apparatus speech.” The latter can be apparatus-compatible, but it is not apparatus-diagnostic until the Greek itself starts talking like a guide.
