Helaman 13:27–28 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and if a man shall come among you and say this ye will receive him and [he will > ye will 1|ye will APS| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOQRT] say that he is a prophet yea ye will lift him up and ye will give unto him of your substance ye will give unto him of your gold and of your silver and ye will clothe him with costly apparel

The original text for this passage has a whole series using the phrase ye will. In one case, the 1837 edition (accidentally, it would appear) omitted the ye will. The 1908 RLDS edition restored the phrase to the RLDS text, but it has never been restored to the LDS text. In accord with the earliest textual sources as well as the parallelism throughout this passage, the critical text will restore the ye will.

It is worth noting that for this second instance of ye will Oliver Cowdery initially wrote he will in 𝓟. He was apparently influenced by the he in the following that-clause (“that he is a prophet”) as well as the preceding reference to him (“ye will receive him”). Virtually immediately Oliver caught his error here: he crossed out the he and supralinearly inserted the correct ye (there is no change in the level of ink flow). 𝓞 undoubtedly read ye will here since the 1830 edition, also a firsthand copy of 𝓞, has ye will.

Summary: Restore in Helaman 13:27 the one case of ye will that was accidentally deleted in the 1837 edition; throughout this passage, there is a systematic repetition of ye will.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

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