Alma 30:30 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea he went on to [blasphemy 1|blaspheme ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST]

The original manuscript is not extant here, but the word blasphemy /blaspheme would have been at the end of the line; so it is possible that Oliver Cowdery’s blasphemy in the printer’s manuscript is a copying error. In any event, the 1830 typesetter replaced the noun blasphemy with the verb blaspheme. Although rare in the text, both the noun blasphemy and the verb blaspheme do occur elsewhere:

The verb expression “to go on to X” also occurs elsewhere in the text, but only once:

In this instance, to is followed by the noun destruction, not a verb (in theory the text could have read something like “and go on to destroy themselves”). This example provides support for restoring in Alma 30:30 the noun reading (“he went on to blasphemy”). The critical text will follow the earliest extant reading, the noun blasphemy, instead of the verb blaspheme.

Summary: Restore in Alma 30:30 the noun blasphemy in place of the verb blaspheme that was introduced into the 1830 edition; there is only one other occurrence in the text of “to go on to X”, and in that instance a noun follows the to (“and go on to destruction”, in Alma 16:17).

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

References