| Origen citation (Comm. Matt. 10.4–10.7 list) | Gospel | Ammonian § | Canon | Ammonian range (from your table) | Boundary type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mt 13:11 | Matthew | 131 | 2 | Mt 13:1–11 | End |
| Mt 13:24 | Matthew | 136 | 10 | Mt 13:24–30 | Start |
| Mt 13:31 | Matthew | 137 | 2 | Mt 13:31–32 | Start |
| Mt 13:33 | Matthew | 138 | 5 | Mt 13:33 | Start and end (single-section unit) |
| Mt 13:34 | Matthew | 139 | 6 | Mt 13:34–35 | Start |
| Mt 13:36 | Matthew | 140 | 10 | Mt 13:36–53 | Start |
| Mk 4:11 | Mark | 36 / 37 | 2 / 1 | Mk 4:1–11b / Mk 4:11c–13 | Split-verse boundary (end and/or start depending on portion cited) |
| Mk 4:30 | Mark | 44 | 2 | Mk 4:30–32 | Start |
| Lk 5:11 | Luke | 32 | 2 | Lk 5:10b–11 | End |
| Gospel | Ammonian | Canon | Pericope range (as in your dataset) | Where Origen is actually drawing from inside that pericope (Comm. Matt. 10.4–7) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew | 140 | 10 | Matthew 13:36–53 | Matt 13:44 (“Πάλιν ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία… θησαυρῷ κεκρυμμένῳ…”); Matt 13:45–46 (merchant/pearl); and he signals the next “two” homoiōseis as contiguous material (so the dragnet, Matt 13:47–50, is implied as the next unit(s) even if your excerpt stops mid-discussion). |
| Matthew | 139 | 6 | Matthew 13:34–35 | Matt 13:34 (“ταῦτα πάντα ἐλάλησεν ἐν παραβολαῖς… καὶ χωρὶς παραβολῆς…”), used as the boundary-marker for “to the crowds” vs “in the house.” |
| Mark | 44 | 2 | Mark 4:30–32 | Mark 4:30 (“Τίνι ὁμοιώσωμεν τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ, ἢ ἐν τίνι αὐτὴν παραβολῇ θῶμεν;”), cited to establish the distinction between ὁμοίωσις and παραβολή. |
Denial: in the passages under consideration, Origen’s Greek does not sound like the language of someone explicitly citing or operating an Ammonian pericope apparatus.
When the evidence is confined strictly to the Greek diction and syntactic techniques used by Origen in Commentary on Matthew 10.8–11, there is no objective linguistic marker that requires, or even strongly suggests, active consultation of an Ammonian system of numbered sections. Origen’s citation practice in these chapters remains fully intelligible within the long-established conventions of lemmatic exegesis. He introduces gospel material by reproducing a lemma or a partial lemma, occasionally with a brief parenthetical locator, and then proceeds immediately to interpretation. The governing verbs and particles—γέγραπται, φησί, λέγει, or simple asyndetic quotation—are the normal tools of scriptural commentary. They function to authorize a saying or narrative detail, not to delimit a textual unit as a navigable segment within an external reference framework.
Even where modern alignment shows that Origen’s chosen verses coincide with Ammonian section boundaries—such as Mt 5:1, Mt 7:6, Mt 7:7, or Lk 13:6—this coincidence remains external to Origen’s prose. The Greek does not shift register at these points. There is no boundary-sensitive language such as μετὰ τὸ…, τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως…, ὧδε ἐπιφέρει…, or ἐπὶ τούτοις ἕπεται…, nor any explicit appeal to περικοπή as a structural unit. Nor does Origen frame his citations in terms of “before,” “after,” or “up to” a recognizable incipit, which would be the natural linguistic reflex of working with a pericope-indexing tool. Instead, the cited verse functions simply as the textual anchor for theological or moral exposition. The verse is treated as semantically salient, not as structurally delimiting.
This stands in sharp contrast to the Greek of To Theodore, where the language unmistakably operates at the level of pericope navigation. There the text is organized by incipits and ranges: μετὰ τὸ ἦσαν δὲ…, καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἕως…, followed by ὧδε ἐπιφέρει κατὰ λέξιν. Such constructions presuppose a reader who can locate a block of text without full citation, precisely because the block is already stabilized and recognizable as a unit. The repeated use of temporal–textual sequencing (μετὰ τὸ…, Ἐπὶ μὲν τούτοις ἕπεται…, Μετὰ δὲ τὸ…) and the explicit naming of πᾶσα ἡ περικοπή make the apparatus-like logic visible on the surface of the Greek. The writer is not merely quoting Scripture; he is directing movement across discrete textual units whose boundaries matter.
No comparable phenomenon appears in Origen’s language in Comm. Matt. 10.8–11. His Greek neither encodes pericope boundaries nor gestures toward a segmented reading technology. While it remains historically plausible that Origen lived in a milieu where proto-Ammonian or Ammonian-like divisions circulated, the passages examined do not themselves bear the linguistic fingerprints of such use. The alignment with Ammonian boundaries is therefore retrospective and analytical, not textual and demonstrable.
