Mosiah 27:35 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and [after >js NULL 1|after A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] they [had >js NULL 1|had A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] traveled throughout all the land of Zarahemla and among all the people which was under the reign of king Mosiah zealously striving to repair all the injuries which they had done to the church confessing all their sins and publishing all the things which they had seen and explaining the prophecies and the scriptures to all who desired to hear them and thus they were instruments in the hands of God in bringing many to the knowledge of the truth yea to the knowledge of their Redeemer

In this long passage, the original text has a long subordinate clause that is never completed. In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith eliminated the lack of closure by deleting the subordinate conjunction after at the beginning of the passage. As discussed above under Enos 1:3, the earliest text sometimes fails to achieve closure. Although such usage is unacceptable in modern discourse structure, it is found fairly often in the original text of the Book of Mormon and will therefore be maintained in the critical text.

In this passage, after deleting the after, Joseph Smith also deleted the perfective auxiliary form had so that the resulting sentence would fit better with the past-tense forms of the overall narrative, as in the preceding text: “they did impart much consolation to the church … these were the names of the sons of Mosiah” (Mosiah 27:33–34). The critical text will, of course, restore the perfective usage since this is how the earliest textual sources read.

Summary: Restore the original subordinate clause with its perfective auxiliary in Mosiah 27:35 (“and after they had traveled throughout all the land of Zarahemla”), despite the fact that this construction never achieves closure.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

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