| Citation (as cited) | Gospel | Ammonian (boundary section) | Canon | Ammonian range (section as given) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mt 10:27 | Matthew | 93 | 5 | Matthew 10:27–32 |
| Mt 16:20–21 | Matthew | 168 | 2 | Matthew 16:20–21 |
| Mt 21:15 | Matthew | 213 | 5 | Matthew 21:15–16 |
| Mt 26:31 | Matthew | 287 | 4 | Matthew 26:31a |
| Jn 6:68 | John | 74 | 1 | Jn 6:68–69 |
The Theodoran excerpt is written in the idiom of someone who is not merely recalling Markan narrative sequence, but navigating a text that has already been segmented into discrete, reusable units. Two features do most of the work: (i) explicit boundary-talk (“after X … and the following until Y”), and (ii) explicit resumption markers (“here he adds verbatim …”; “upon these follows …”; “after the ‘and he comes…’ he adds only …”). Those are precisely the kinds of operations an Ammonian apparatus is designed to support: the ability to enter a gospel at a known seam, traverse a block, then re-enter at the next seam—without reproducing the whole intervening narrative.
The key phrase is the programmatic Ἀμέλει μετὰ τὸ … καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως …. The combination of μετὰ τὸ (a pointer to a preceding incipit), τὰ ἑξῆς (a shorthand for the continuous run that follows), and ἕως (a defined terminus) is the rhetoric of a table rather than of ordinary citation. It does not behave like an author who is quoting “from memory” or even “from a codex” in the usual way; it behaves like someone using a coordinate system to locate a stretch of text. The incipit ἦσαν δὲ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ… functions as the “hook” by which the reader finds the block; the terminus μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἀναστήσεται functions as the “stop” point. The crucial point is that this is not presented as a thematic paraphrase but as a mechanical instruction for traversing text, which is exactly what Ammonius/Eusebius-style sectioning makes possible.
That same “table-idiom” continues with Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν…. ὧδε is deictic (“at this point”), and ἐπιφέρει (“he adds / appends”) is the verb you use when the text is treated as a chain of appended units. The addition κατὰ λέξιν sharpens the point: what follows is not a loose recollection but a claim of verbatim alignment with a written exemplar. In an apparatus-driven environment, “verbatim” matters because the section numbers (or the parallel table) presuppose relatively stable wording at unit edges; hence the insistence that the author “brings in word-for-word” at the seam.
Then the writer closes the inserted narrative with Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται… καὶ πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή. Here ἕπεται (“there follows”) again treats the gospel as a sequence of blocks; and πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή is an overtly technical noun-phrase. A “pericope” is not simply “a story,” but a bounded extractable unit. When the writer says “and the whole pericope,” he signals that the unit is already recognized as a unit in the handling of the text—exactly the presupposition of Ammonian sectioning. The rhetorical function is: I have shown you the interpolated block; once that block is done, the text resumes with the next recognized unit.
Finally, the negative statement οὐκ εὑρίσκεται (“it is not found”) occurs in the same apparatus-logic. The writer is not arguing abstractly that something is “un-Markan”; he is reporting an inspection result of a delimited textual tradition: “this phrase and the other things you wrote are not found.” In practice, one checks “not found” by searching at seams and within indexed units. The preceding seam-language (“after the ‘…’, and the following until …”; “here he appends verbatim …”; “upon these follows …”) tells you how the search was conducted: by navigating unit boundaries.
Against that, what does Origen do in Comm. Matt. 12.16–19? Origen’s discourse is saturated with explicit citation formulas and lemma-work, but it is comparatively thin in boundary language. He quotes and juxtaposes sayings—e.g., «ἐπὶ ἡγεμόνας δὲ καὶ βασιλεῖς…», «παραδώσει δὲ ἀδελφὸς…», «πᾶς οὖν ὅστις ὁμολογήσει ἐν ἐμοὶ…»—and he does so with the habits of a commentator who can move quickly across Matthean logia, sometimes chaining “καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς,” but usually in the service of argument rather than navigation. Even when he uses shorthand, it is ordinarily argumentative shorthand (“and the following [points]”), not seam-definition (“from this incipit until that explicit terminus”). The Greek in the Origen excerpt tends toward interpretive framing—ἀναγκαῖον μὲν οὖν…, διόπερ…, πρόσεχε γὰρ τῇ … λέξει—rather than toward procedural directions for finding a delimited block.
This is why, as a witness to Ammonius, the Theodoran language can look paradoxically stronger on the purely philological surface: it sounds like someone operating a segmented text (incipit → run → terminus; seam → verbatim insertion; “the pericope” → resumption), which is exactly what the Ammonian project supplies. Origen, by contrast, is perfectly compatible with an Ammonian apparatus—indeed he is the sort of reader who would benefit from one—but the Greek does not in itself force the conclusion that he is using that apparatus, because his citation practice can be generated by other learned technologies: a codex with marginal kephalaia, a catena of testimonia, memorized logia clusters, or simply the habits of σχολιασμός that move from lemma to lemma without needing a formal cross-gospel table.
So, in terms of probative force: the Theodoran excerpt is the clearer piece of internal evidence for an apparatus-like mode of consultation, because its Greek is procedural and boundary-conscious—μετὰ τὸ… τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως…, ὧδε ἐπιφέρει, ἕπεται… πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή, μετὰ δὲ τὸ… ἐπάγει μόνον—the very moves of someone reading through seams. Origen’s passage, by itself, is weaker as a direct witness to Ammonius because it is primarily exegetical and can be explained without positing a section-table. If one wants to make Origen into strong evidence for Ammonius, one normally needs a different kind of Origenian datum: places where his Greek betrays indexed navigation (explicit seam markers; stable incipit/explicit terminus handling; systematic parallel-hopping keyed to unit edges) rather than mere lemma quotation.
In short, the Theodoran Greek reads like a user-manual for a segmented gospel—an apparatus-user’s register. Origen’s Greek here reads like a commentator at work; compatible with an apparatus, but not, on this excerpt alone, compelled by it.
