Alma 63:14 Textual Variants

The original manuscript is not extant here for the first part of this sentence. In the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote dissensions, but he later corrected this word to dissenters by crossing out the final sions and supralinearly inserting ters. The quill for this correction was sharper, which argues that this change was made later, probably when Oliver proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞. The lacuna in 𝓞 is large enough that we cannot tell for sure whether it read dissenters or dissensions, but usage elsewhere in the text argues strongly that it would have read dissenters since dissensions never “go forth” in the Book of Mormon but dissenters do:

• Helaman 4:4 there were dissenters which went up from the Nephites unto the Lamanites
• Helaman 5:17 they did confound many of those dissenters which had gone over from the Nephites
• Helaman 11:24 there were a certain number of the dissenters from the people of Nephi which had some years before gone over unto the Lamanites
• Helaman 11:25 inasmuch as there were dissenters that went forth unto them

In fact, the last example uses that same verb phrase, “to go forth”.