GA 2685 is a 14th century manuscript housed in the Varlaam Monastery in Metora, containing the Gospels, Romans and Hebrews. Although the folio numbers themselves are not clear, the images in the NTVMR seem to show that Hebrews begins on 291v, while Romans ends on 291r which would make this one of the few Greek manuscripts that (as with P46) has Hebrews immediately after Romans. This witness was transcribed by the IGNTP for the ECM of Romans and is included in the collation published here.
In my recently published book, Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans and the Textual History of the New Testament (Brill, 2025), I included a phylogenetic reconstruction of the textual history of Romans (also freely available in the online supplement), based on an apparatus of high-entropy variation units derived from the IGNTP transcriptions. In this stemma, GA 2685 was placed as a sister manuscript to GA 6, closely related to GA 424KC, and in turn to GA 1739, 1881, and 1908K. Since this section of the tradition was not especially relevant to my focus in that book, I did not think much about this at the time or discuss it further.
However, I’m currently working on a paper with Joey McCollum that will introduce a set of tools for identifying manuscript groupings within a large collation, and GA 2685 came up again. This time I paid attention. Based on a quick preliminary search, this witness doesn’t seem to have been discussed in any detail in connection with the cluster of witnesses related to GA 1739 (while included in a table in a recent article by Gäbel on Hebrews in GA 1739, it isn’t discussed; it isn’t mentioned in Birdsall’s or Peterson’s dissertations), though please let me know in the comments if this connection has already been pointed out. However, it shares a large number of distinctive readings with this cluster, far too many to be a coincidence.
In the table below (based on one of Joey’s extremely helpful tools, that will be properly introduced in the paper we are working on), I’ve ordered the readings that connect GA 2685 and one or more members of the GA 1739-related cluster based on how distinctive they are, with the list limited to readings shared by ten or fewer witnesses including GA 2685 (there are many more agreements that involve a larger number of witnesses).
The first column has the reference to the ECM collation, the second has the distinctive reading found in GA 2685, the third has the witnesses that share this reading, and the fourth has the other readings found in this location. I’ve highlighted in blue the readings that seem to me the most significant agreements. While the connections to GA 6 are the most striking (not only does it have two unique agreements, but it agrees with GA6 in 98.99% of readings in the full collation), GA 2685 also agrees with other witnesses in this cluster in places where it disagrees with GA 6, meaning that it is unlikely to descend from it directly. In any case, GA 2685 should be included in subsequent investigations of this fascinating cluster of witnesses.
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