1 Nephi 4:31 Textual Variants

When copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery initially replaced “a man large in stature” with “a man of large stature”, but then he immediately caught his error, crossed out “of large stature”, and supralinearly inserted “large in stature”, the reading of the original manuscript. Elsewhere the text has examples of both types:

• 1 Nephi 2:16
  • being large in stature
• Mormon 2:1
  • I being young was large in stature
• Ether 14:10
  • Lib was a man of great stature

So either reading in 1 Nephi 4:31 is theoretically possible; the manuscript evidence clearly supports “large in stature”.