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The strongest evidence for the use of an Ammonian-type apparatus is not a bare quantity of Gospel quotations, but the way a writer’s Greek treats the Gospel text as a sequence of retrievable units with stable entry points: incipits that function as addresses, and transitions that are handled as moves from one unit to the next. In that sense, what matters is not merely that Origen cites Matthew or John, but that the citations behave like “section-heads” rather than like free-floating prooftexts. Where the commentary repeatedly lands on phrases that are narratively hinge-like and lexically “hard,” it is behaving as if it has an underlying segmentation scheme that makes such hinges the natural handles for reference and retrieval. In Origen’s Greek practice in the commentaries, the relevant phenomenon is the lemma-driven economy of quotation. Origen is often not paraphrasing expansively but anchoring exegesis to short, stable cues: beginnings of scenes, speech-openers, formulaic transitions, and other incipit-like strings that can be “grabbed” reliably. This is precisely what a sectional system needs, because a concordance-table (Ammonius and, later, Eusebius) is only as usable as its unit-headers are stable. When Origen repeatedly begins from a lemma that coincides with a recognizable narrative hinge—phrases of the “Καὶ …” / “Ἐν …” / “Ἀκούσας δέ …” type, or other scene-openers—he is treating the Gospel text as articulated into chunks whose beginnings are rhetorically privileged. Even where he is not explicit about “sections,” the Greek can show a habit of pausing at, and restarting from, such boundary markers. Your reduced table captures this behavior in a more mechanical way: in that stretch of Comm. Matt. 12,4–5 the citations repeatedly fall on the beginnings of discrete Ammonian units (e.g., Mt 16:1; Mt 16:4; Mt 16:5–6; Mt 16:7–12; Jn 1:14; Jn 6:51; Lk 7:36–50), rather than wandering indifferently within longer narrative spans. That pattern is suggestive because it looks like a “lookup habit”: Origen is reaching for start-points that are optimized for indexing. But the key point is that, in Origen, this remains an inference from usage. The Greek does not typically say, “I now move to the next pericope,” nor does it generally advertise a cross-reference technology. It is compatible with an Ammonian apparatus, and in places it looks tailored to it, yet it can also be explained (at least in part) by the natural rhetorical advantages of incipits in oral/aural exegesis: beginnings are memorable, quotable, and easy to verify in a codex. Origen’s habit can be the living scholarly practice that later gets formalized by tables; it can also be a practice already shaped by earlier segmentation. The Greek behavior alone tells you that Origen is working with Gospel text as a set of addressable units; it does not force the conclusion that he is consulting numbered Ammonian sections as such. By contrast, the Greek of Theodore is overtly navigational and therefore much closer to the surface grammar of an apparatus. Two phrases do a great deal of work. First, the letter’s “Ἀμέλει … καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως …” is not ordinary citation; it is apparatus-language. “Καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς” (“and the following”) combined with “ἕως” (“until”) is exactly how one indicates a bounded run from one recognisable cue to another without quoting everything in between. That is how you speak when you expect the reader to locate the place by incipit and then traverse within a bounded unit. Second, “Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν …” is even more explicit. “Ἐπιφέρει” frames what follows as a carried-forward text-segment, and “κατὰ λέξιν” marks it as verbatim, as if the writer is reproducing an anchored textual node. In other words, Theodore does not merely cite; he directs the reader through the text by technical wayfinding: after such-and-such incipit, take “the next things” up to a second incipit; “here” the text “brings in” the following “word-for-word.” That navigational stance becomes clearer again when Theodore shifts from quotation to sequencing language: “Ἐκεῖθεν δὲ … ἐπέστρεψεν … Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται … καὶ πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή.” The appearance of “ἡ περικοπή” is especially arresting because it names what Origen’s practice only implies: the text is being treated as composed of pericope-units that can be taken as wholes (“and the whole pericope”). Even if “περικοπή” could be used loosely, here it sits inside a discourse whose point is to delimit what “follows” and what does not, and to mark a unit as present or absent. Theodore’s Greek therefore looks less like a homilist’s citation habit and more like the language of someone who has a segmented exemplar before him and is tracing its joints. If the question is whether Theodore’s language reflects employment of an Ammonian apparatus, the answer is that it is formally closer to that world than Origen is. It reads like someone using incipits and bounded spans as address markers, which is exactly how sectional cross-reference systems are read in practice. Theodore is also explicitly policing adjacency—“after X comes Y; after these follows Z”—which is again how an indexed segmentation is operationalized. Origen’s evidence, by contrast, is primarily statistical and behavioral: repeated anchoring to boundary-like phrases and a tendency for lemmata to coincide with unit-starts. That is compatible with Ammonius, and in your extracted boundary-only dataset it is suggestive, but it remains indirect. So, as a witness to Origen’s use of Ammonius, Theodore is in one sense stronger and in another sense weaker. It is stronger because its Greek is explicitly apparatus-like: “τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως,” “Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει,” and “πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή” are not the idiom of casual citation; they are the idiom of textual navigation through pre-divided units. It is weaker as evidence for Origen specifically, because Theodore is not Origen and because the letter’s rhetoric is polemical and editorial: it is concerned with exposing “κατεψευσμένα,” and that context encourages a kind of clipped, directive referencing that resembles table-usage even if one were merely handling a segmented codex without any explicit Ammonian numeration. Origen’s witness is weaker formally, because he rarely speaks in this overtly navigational idiom; yet it is, in another sense, the more probative historical datum if what you need is early evidence of a scholarly habit that presupposes segmentability. Origen shows the practice embedded in continuous exegesis; Theodore shows the practice named and performed as navigation. The upshot is that the Greek of Theodore looks like an apparatus being actively used as a referencing technology, while Origen’s Greek looks like a commentary tradition whose lemma-technique and hinge-quoting are highly congenial to, and plausibly already shaped by, an Ammonian segmentation. If you are asking for “witness to Origen’s use of Ammonius,” the argument from Origen must remain probabilistic and cumulative, built from boundary-aligned lemmata and recurring hinge-formulas; Theodore gives you a more explicit type of evidence, but it is evidence of the method rather than evidence that Origen himself is consulting a numbered Ammonian table. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Does Origen Commentary on Matthew (12:4 - 7) Signal He is Using Ammonius Vs Clement's Letter to Theodore?
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