Mosiah 2:41 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into [the > NULL 1| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] heaven

Here in Mosiah 2:41, Oliver Cowdery started to write either “into the heaven” or “into the kingdom of heaven”. He initially wrote into the k in 𝓟; then he immediately crossed out the k (the level of ink flow is unchanged) and wrote inline the word heaven:

The k may have stood for the first letter of kingdom or as a miswritten form of h. (Sometimes Oliver Cowdery’s h ’s look like k ’s; see, for instance, the discussion under 3 Nephi 19:4 regarding the misspelling of the name Kumenonhi as Kumenonki.) For further discussion of the phraseology “in the heaven”, see under 1 Nephi 12:6.

Summary: The critical text will maintain the immediately corrected reading in Mosiah 2:41: “they are received into heaven”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 2

References