Alma 11:44 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but all things shall be restored to its perfect frame as it is now [& > or 0|𝓢① on and > 𝓢② or 1|or ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] in the body and all shall be brought and be raigned before the bar of Christ the Son of God the Father and the Holy Spirit which [is 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|NULL >jg is 1] one eternal God

Here in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially thought that “as it is now” ended without any following explanatory prepositional phrase; that is, he didn’t expect the following “or in the body” (which explains the phrase “as it is now”), and so he initially wrote and (as an ampersand). Oliver then crossed out the ampersand and supralinearly wrote the correct or in 𝓞. When scribe 2 of 𝓟 copied the text here, he miswrote or as on and then added an and, thus ending up with the inexplicable “as it is now on and in the body”. (Oliver’s n’s and r’s often look alike, thus the tendency for the scribe in 𝓟 or the 1830 typesetter to misread the r or n in some words; see the discussion under Mosiah 2:15–16.) Here in Alma 11:44, when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞, Oliver crossed out scribe 2’s error, on and, and once more supralinearly inserted the correct or.

Nearby, John Gilbert also inserted the word is that was missing in his copytext (𝓟 incorrectly read “the Son of God the Father and the Holy Spirit which one eternal God”). Gilbert’s emendation was the right one since 𝓞 is extant here and reads “which is one eternal God”.

Summary: Accept in Alma 11:44 Oliver Cowdery’s correcting or (he made this correction in both 𝓞 and 𝓟); the compositor’s insertion in 𝓟 of is in the relative clause “which is one eternal God” was also correct.

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

References