The Greek adjective agnaphos (ἄγναφος) means unshrunken or undressed — referring specifically to new, untreated cloth that has not yet been washed or shrunk. It appears twice in the New Testament, both times in the parable of the patch and the garment (Matthew 9:16 and Mark 2:21). The word is a compound of the negative prefix a- and knapto (to card, to dress cloth).
The word is significant not for its frequency but for its parabolic use: Jesus chooses this precise technical term to make a precise theological point about the incompatibility of the old and the new.
In Jesus's parable, an agnaphos (unshrunken) patch sewn onto an old garment will cause a worse tear when washed — the new patch shrinks and pulls away the old fabric around it. The parable is Jesus's explanation of why He does not perform His ministry within the structures of Pharisaic Judaism: the new wine of the kingdom cannot be contained in old wineskins, and a new patch tears an old garment.
Theologically, this parable confronts a fundamental human tendency: to take what is genuinely new from God and try to incorporate it into our existing religious frameworks. The kingdom of God is not a reformed Judaism, not a cleaned-up moralism, not religion-plus-Jesus. It is something genuinely new — not a patch but a new garment entirely. The gospel does not renovate the old; it creates the new. "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17).