While discussing pregeneaological coherence of New Testament manuscripts, Tommy Wasserman and Peter J. Gurry write the following:
If manuscript A and manuscript B are compared at one hundred places and disagree at twenty, then their pregeneaological coherence is 80 percent (eighty out of one hundred). In this, pregeneaological coherence is a purely quantitative measure of textual agreement. In the Catholic Letters, the highest level of agreement is 99.1 percent, shared between 614 and 2412. In all, they only disagree in twenty-seven places out of 2,859. The lowest agreement between any two witnesses is 77.8 percent, shared between 1241 and 1838. These two disagree with each other at 624 of 2,816 places. The average agreement between all pairs of witnesses is 87.6 percent. The results from Acts show similar levels: the highest is 98.8 percent, shared between 1270 and 1297; the lowest is 63.4 percent, shared between 05 and 441. In the case of 05, its average agreement with all other witnesses is quite low (about 66 percent). This is not surprising, given the unique character of Codex Bezae’s text in Acts. Among other things, these numbers show just how well these portions of the New Testament text have been preserved overall. Wachtel says of Acts that “most witnesses agree with each other at most variant passages,” and this could also be said of the Catholic Letters. Positively, the overall high level of agreement among our witnesses is what makes pregeneaological coherence such a promising tool in practice. (Tommy Wasserman and Peter J. Gurry, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method [Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017], 27-28)
