For the second (1837) edition, Joseph Smith replaced the infinitive phrase “to be” with the indicative form of the be verb. The intervening relative clause “which I make” obscures the grammatical mixture of indicative clause and infinitive phrase in “I know that the record … to be true”.
A simpler way to have edited the text would have been to have deleted the subordinate conjunction that, which would have given “and I know the record which I make to be true”. In fact, this very kind of construction is found later on in the text:
One could use this passage to argue for deleting the that in 1 Nephi 1:3.
The text has a few other cases of infinitive phrases serving as the complement to the verb know:
The original text appears to have had another example of a mixed construction that combines the subordinate conjunction that with an infinitive phrase. In this case, the text was also edited for the 1837 edition (and also apparently by Joseph Smith), but this time by deleting the that:
One might ask whether the earlier mixed constructions in 1 Nephi 1:3 and Moroni 4:1 might be due to accidentally inserting that during the writing down of Joseph Smith’s dictation or during the later copying of the original manuscript into the printer’s manuscript. (For both of these passages the original manuscript is not extant.)
There are two arguments that could be used against this hypothesis. First, the resulting text in Moroni 4:1 is sufficiently awkward that one wonders why it was ever accepted in the first place if it were simply due to miscopying. Its very awkwardness argues that this construction was intended. (The text in 1 Nephi 1:3 is not as difficult grammatically because the infinitive phrase “to be” is delayed by the intervening relative clause “which I make”.)
A second argument is that there are no examples in the manuscripts of the scribes accidentally adding the subordinate conjunction after the verb know. The few examples that are found show only a scribal tendency to delete the that:
From a statistical point of view, this evidence must be used with caution. There are only a relatively few cases in the text where the verb know is followed by a full indicative (or subjunctive) clause for which the subordinate conjunction that is missing. We have the following statistics based on the earliest textual sources (not on the current text, for which there has been a continuing overall but minor tendency to drop the that after the verb know):
| Earliest text | Manuscript slips | |
| clause with that | 307 | 5 |
| clause without that | 12 | 0 |
Since there are so few cases where the that would have been missing in the first place, it would therefore be difficult to find cases where it could have been accidentally added!
Summary: The original text in 1 Nephi 1:3 probably read according to the earliest textual sources (“I know that the record which I make to be true”) because a similar yet even more awkward construction originally occurred in Moroni 4:1 (“we know that the manner to be true”); if 1 Nephi 1:3 is to be revised, the that should be deleted in order to agree with the usage in 3 Nephi 5:18 (“I know the record which I make to be a just and a true record”).