| Citation | Boundary status | Ammonian section(s) involved |
|---|---|---|
| Mt 16:13–16 | Exact section-range (start+end) | Matthew 166 = Mt 16:13–16 |
| Mt 16:13–14 | Starts at a boundary (but not the whole unit) | Start of Matthew 166 (Mt 16:13–16) |
| Mt 16:13 | Start boundary | Start of Matthew 166 (Mt 16:13–16) |
| Mt 16:16 | End boundary | End of Matthew 166 (Mt 16:13–16) |
| Mt 16:16–17 | Straddles a boundary seam | End of Matthew 166 (…16) + start of Matthew 167 (17–19) |
| Mt 16:17–18 | Starts at a boundary | Start of Matthew 167 (Mt 16:17–19) |
| Mt 16:17 | Start boundary | Start of Matthew 167 (Mt 16:17–19) |
| Mt 11:14–15 | Starts at a boundary (range begins at a section start) | Start of Matthew 106 (Mt 11:14–15) |
| Mt 11:14 | Start boundary | Start of Matthew 106 (Mt 11:14–15) |
| Mt 11:15 | End boundary | End of Matthew 106 (Mt 11:14–15) |
| Mt 3:13–17 | Composite that crosses a boundary | Matthew 13 = Mt 3:13–15 (starts at 3:13); Matthew 14 = Mt 3:16–17 (starts at 3:16) |
| Mt 3:13–15 (implicit inside Ammonian “Mt 3:13–17”) | Exact section-range (start+end) | Matthew 13 = Mt 3:13–15 |
| Mt 3:16–17 (implicit inside Ammonian “Mt 3:13–17”) | Exact section-range (start+end) | Matthew 14 = Mt 3:16–17 |
| Mt 7:24 | Start boundary | Start of Matthew 61 (Mt 7:24–27) |
| Jn 20:22–23 | Straddles a boundary seam | End of John 214 (Jn 20:20b–22) + start of John 215 (Jn 20:23) |
| Jn 20:23 | Start boundary | Start of John 215 (Jn 20:23) |
In Comm. Matt. 12.8–12.11 the prima facie “apparatus” signal is not a metalanguage of navigation (“after this, up to that”), but a quieter kind of evidence: the way Origen’s explicit citations repeatedly land on, and sometimes deliberately traverse, seams that correspond to the Ammonian segmentation . The most conspicuous case is the Caesarea Philippi complex. Origen’s lemmatic anchoring at Mt 16:13–16 coincides exactly with a single Ammonian unit (Matthew 166 = 16:13–16), and his subsequent citation-pattern does not simply continue “within Matthew 16,” but marks the transition point that an indexer needs to know: Mt 16:16–17 straddles the boundary between Matthew 166 (ending at 16:16) and Matthew 167 (beginning at 16:17 and running through 16:19). That is the kind of citation that is awkward if one is thinking only in terms of continuous narrative, but perfectly natural if one is thinking in terms of section-edges: the hinge verse (“σὺ εἶ ὁ Χριστός…”) is treated as a terminal point that can be paired with the immediately following incipit (“μακάριος εἶ, Σίμων Βαριωνᾶ…”) as a new indexed unit. The same sensitivity to a sectional seam appears in the Johannine material: the citation Jn 20:22–23 crosses from John 214 (ending at 20:22) into John 215 (beginning at 20:23). Again, the point is not that Origen announces a “new pericope,” but that his proof-texting behavior is compatible with, and suggestive of, a habit of handling the Gospel text in pre-cut units whose edges are stable enough to be traversed intentionally.
This becomes more pointed when the boundary-hitting is not confined to Matthew. In this stretch Origen is doing something that an Ammonian system is designed to facilitate: he is coordinating doctrinal or exegetical discussion by parking on short, addressable blocks and then importing parallel or thematically adjacent blocks from another Gospel. The Samaritan woman material (Jn 4:13–14) is interior to Ammonian John 33 (Jn 4:4–42), so it is not itself a boundary-witness; but the way it is introduced—“ἀρκεῖ δὲ παραδείγματος χάριν…” and then a direct “πᾶς ὁ πίνων… / ὃς δ’ ἂν πίῃ…”—functions like an inserted, self-contained exemplum that does not require a long narrative context. That is exactly the kind of portability that increases when the reader is trained to think in terms of discrete, nameable sections. Likewise, on the Matthean side, the boundary-citation Mt 11:14–15 (Matthew 106) appears in a cluster where Origen is explicitly arguing from the wording (“εἰ θέλετε δέξασθαι…”, “ὁ ἔχων ὦτα…”) and thereby prefers short textual packets that can be lifted whole. Even Mt 7:24, cited as the incipit of Matthew 61 (7:24–27), shows the same habit: Origen chooses a pericope-head (“πᾶς οὖν ὅστις ἀκούει…”) rather than a midstream clause. None of this compels the conclusion that Origen has Ammonius’s tables physically in front of him; it does, however, provide a textured, Greek-level pattern—seam-crossing and incipit-grabbing across more than one Gospel—that sits very comfortably with the mental world created by an Ammonian apparatus.
When you put that next to Theodore’s language, the contrast is stark, because Theodore does not merely behave as if he knows sectional edges; he speaks the language of a navigational system. The string “Ἀμέλει μετὰ τὸ ἦσαν δὲ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ… καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως, μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἀναστήσεται” is not exegetical commentary in the ordinary sense; it is an explicit directive that assumes the reader can locate a lemma and then run forward within a bounded stretch (“τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως…”). That is apparatus-talk: it treats the Gospel as a surface to be indexed by recognizable incipits and termini. The same is true of “Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν”—a procedural marker announcing verbatim continuation—and of “Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται… καὶ πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή,” where περικοπή is not merely “a passage” in a loose rhetorical sense but a unit that can be referred to as a whole after a cue-phrase. Even the connective choreography (“Ἐκεῖθεν δὲ ἀναστὰς…”, “Μετὰ δὲ τὸ… ἐπάγει μόνον…”) reads like controlled stitching between pre-marked blocks: the writer is policing what belongs “in the pericope” and what does not, and he is doing so by reference to named hinge-phrases rather than by continuous quotation.
So, as a witness to “employment of an Ammonian apparatus,” Theodore is the stronger text—stronger not necessarily because it proves the historical existence of a specific set of tables in the author’s hands, but because its Greek makes the apparatus-like procedure overt. Its μετά τό… / τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως… / Ὧδε ἐπιφέρει… / πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή forms a metadiscourse of locating, bounding, and chaining lemmata that is exactly what an index-and-sections technology trains readers to do. Origen, by contrast, gives a weaker, indirect witness: he does not narrate a procedure, and his citations could in principle be explained as “natural pericope awareness” that any competent reader acquires without tables. Yet the particular Greek-level profile —citations that land precisely on section-ranges (Mt 16:13–16), citations that straddle a seam (Mt 16:16–17; Jn 20:22–23), and repeated preference for incipits (Mt 16:13; Mt 7:24; Mt 11:14)—is more than random proof-texting. It is the sort of pattern one expects when Gospel reading is mediated by stable sectional boundaries: even without explicit apparatus-language, Origen’s practice looks like it has been formed in a culture where those boundaries exist and matter.
If we are weighing probative force for “Origen uses Ammonius (pre-Eusebian)”: Theodore’s Greek is a direct phenomenology of an apparatus-user; Origen’s Greek is circumstantial but cumulative, and its best point is the seam-citation behavior, because seams are where a segmentation system most visibly constrains how one points into the text. In that narrow sense, Origen is a weaker witness than Theodore in explicitness, but not negligible in evidentiary value, because he supplies something Theodore does not: a demonstrable, multi-Gospel, seam-aware citation practice embedded in live exegetical work rather than in a polemical or corrective description of “what follows” in a gospel copy.
