1 Nephi 4:35 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and he promised that he would go down into the wilderness unto [our 0APST|my > our 1|my BCDEFGHIJKLMNOQR] father

The inclination here has been to introduce the reading “my father”. When copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “my father” but immediately corrected it to “our father”. For the 1837 edition, the typesetter apparently made the same mistake. The original manuscript is extant here and reads “our father”. Both the 1908 RLDS edition and the 1981 LDS edition restored the original reading.

The source for this error comes from the earlier verse where Nephi’s words to Zoram are directly quoted:

Summary: Maintain the original reading “unto our father” in 1 Nephi 4:35, despite the use of “to my father” in the previous verse.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 1

References