| Gospel | Boundary verse actually cited in MAT.COM 11,19 | Ammonian pericope | Apparatus range | Boundary type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew | Mt 14:14 | 146 | Mt 14:13–14 | End |
| Matthew | Mt 14:15 | 147 | Mt 14:15–21 | Start |
| Matthew | Mt 14:21 | 147 | Mt 14:15–21 | End |
| Matthew | Mt 15:23 | 157 | Mt 15:15–23 | End |
| Matthew | Mt 15:28 | 159 | Mt 15:25–28 | End |
| Mark | — | — | — | No cited verse is the start or end of an Ammonian section in the Mark file (Mk 6:39 and Mk 8:6 are interior to sections 64 and 76). |
| Luke | — | — | — | No cited verse is the start or end of an Ammonian section in the Luke file (Lk 9:14 and Lk 13:12 are interior to sections 93 and 164). |
| John | Jn 6:13 | 49 | Jn 6:5–13 | End |
In Origen, the most telling Greek evidence for an “Ammonian” habit of reading is not a bare appeal to parallel places, but a recurrent way of segmenting gospel narrative into stable, reusable “blocks” that can be compared, recombined, and traversed without losing one’s place. In Comm. Matt. 11.19 the exegetical movement repeatedly presupposes that the feeding material is already parcelled into recognizable units, so that one can shuttle between “that feeding” and “this feeding” as two comparable dossiers. Origen marks this unit-thinking by a compact system of deictic and connective language that treats each episode as a discrete object. The constant alternation of ἐκεῖ / ἐνθάδε and πάλιν ἐκεῖ μέν / ἐνθάδε δέ (“there … here … again there … here”) is not merely stylistic: it is the rhetoric of a reader who has already abstracted two pericopae from their continuous narrative stream and is now laying them side-by-side. He does not proceed verse-by-verse as one would when following a continuous lection; rather, he repeatedly re-identifies the same episode by a small cluster of anchoring phrases (“ἐξελθὼν … εἶδε πολὺν ὄχλον,” “ὀψίας γενομένης,” “ἀπὸλυσον αὐτούς,” “πέντε ἄρτους καὶ δύο ἰχθύας,” “ἀναβλέψας εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν ηὐλόγησεν,” and so forth), then sets against them the corresponding anchors for the second feeding. This is exactly the kind of “pericope label” logic an apparatus requires: brief, stable verbal incipits and internal “signature lines” that permit reliable retrieval and comparison.
Two further features in the Greek intensify this impression. First, Origen’s repeated use of formulaic shorthand for continuation—καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς, used in the passage you quoted and in his broader practice—belongs to a culture of excerpting and indexing: it signals that the “unit” has been sufficiently identified and does not need to be recopied in full. Second, Origen’s explicit triangulation of verbal agreement and difference among the evangelists (“<ταῖς> αὐταῖς λέξεσιν οἱ τρεῖς εὐαγγελισταί φασιν…,” contrasted with “ὡς ὁ Ματθαῖος καὶ Μᾶρκος ἀνέγραψαν…,” and the note that John “παρηλλαγμένον” records one feeding but “ταύτης δὲ οὐδὲ τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐμνημόνευσε”) is the analytic posture that grows naturally out of a cross-reference table: the unit is first located, then its parallel witnesses are collated, then divergence is registered as an explanatory datum. Even the imperative Ζητήσεις… (“you will seek…”) and the methodological Προσέχων… (“attending to…”) enact the act of consulting another textual “place” as if it were readily reachable by a navigational aid. In other words, Comm. Matt. 11.19 reads like the verbal trace of a mind trained to move across indexed loci, not merely to recall parallels from memory.
Against this, the Letter to Theodore passage offers a different—and in one respect even more explicit—kind of apparatus-conscious Greek. The author’s phrasing is overtly “indexical”: “Ἀμέλει μετὰ τὸ ἦσαν δὲ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ… καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως, μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἀναστήσεται” is an instruction in sequential placement using two boundary-markers (“after X … up to Y”). The incipit-style cue “ἦσαν δὲ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ ἀναβαίνοντες εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα” and the terminus “μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἀναστήσεται” function as a pair of bookends, and then the author adds “Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν,” before supplying the inserted narrative. This is the language of a compiler or corrector who is describing exactly where something is to be found in a continuous text and what follows “here” in the exemplar.
Crucially, Theodore also employs the technical vocabulary of discrete units more overtly than Origen does in Comm. Matt. 11.19: “καὶ πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή” names the block as such, and “Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται τὸ…” treats the subsequent material as an attached segment that comes next in the sequence. That explicit “pericope” label is not necessary for narrative reading; it is natural, however, in an environment where the gospel is routinely handled as a series of extractable sections. Theodore’s phrasing therefore feels closer to the metalanguage of a system like the Ammonian sections: not merely moving between parallels, but speaking about the segmentation.
So which is the stronger witness to the use of an Ammonian apparatus? It depends on what you mean by “use.”
If the question is whether the Greek betrays familiarity with segmented navigation—the habit of locating, delimiting, and moving between stable gospel “blocks”—then Theodore’s language is the more direct witness, because it openly performs boundary-work (“μετὰ… ἕως…”) and names the “pericope” as an object (“πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή”), then signals literal transcription (“κατὰ λέξιν”). It reads like a set of instructions keyed to an already-sectioned book.
If, however, the question is whether Origen’s Greek shows the kind of reading practice that the Ammonian apparatus was designed to support—systematic comparison of parallel narratives by controlling entry-points and anchoring phrases—then Comm. Matt. 11.19 supplies a subtler but very significant witness. Origen does not explicitly “point” with μετὰ… ἕως…, nor does he cite section numbers; yet his prose is saturated with the comparative mechanics of pericope-handling: repeated deictic pairing (ἐκεῖ/ἐνθάδε), excerpt-like compression (καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς), and a sustained alternation between the two feedings treated as discrete, comparable narrative packets. That is the operational footprint of a section-based apparatus even when the numbering system remains implicit.
On balance, Theodore is the stronger witness for explicit apparatus-language—the diction of placement, limits, and pericope-as-unit. Origen is the stronger witness for habitual apparatus-logic—a mode of exegesis that presupposes stable pericope units and easy cross-gospel traversal, even if he does not overtly advertise the machinery. Put differently: Theodore sounds like someone writing with the index in hand; Origen sounds like someone whose exegetical method already thinks in the way an index makes possible.
