The earliest textual sources (the 1830 edition and the printer’s manuscript) read “and there shall be among them which will not believe it”, which seems quite awkward and is not improved by the editing of the which to who for the 1837 edition. The problem here in the earliest extant text is that the prepositional phrase “among them” is not directly connected to the relative clause “which will not believe it”. If “among them” is placed at the beginning of the clause, the difficulty is immediately apparent: “and among them there shall be which will not believe it”. All other instances in the text of “among them which” (and “among them who”) do work:
Not surprisingly, there are no examples elsewhere in the text like the earliest reading here in 3 Nephi 21:9.
Besides the expected change of which to who, two different changes have been made to the text here. The first was the deletion of the pronoun them (introduced in the 1837 edition): “and there shall be among who will not believe it”. This reading is so difficult that one doubts that the omission of the them was due to conscious editing. The 1841 British edition followed this reading, but the subsequent LDS edition (1849) restored the them (“among them who will not believe it”); this reading, still awkward, persisted in the LDS text until 1920.
The second change was the insertion of those after them (introduced in the 1840 edition, probably by Joseph Smith in his editing for that edition): “and there shall be among them those who will not believe it”. This reading continued in the RLDS textual tradition until 1908, when the corrected reading in 𝓟, the result of Joseph’s editing for the 1837 edition, was restored (“among them who will not believe it”). The editors for the 1920 LDS edition, on the other hand, decided to adopt the 1840 reading with the those (“among them those who will not believe it”). When we consider usage elsewhere in the text, we find little to support the existential expression “there <<em>be verb> among those ”. In fact, there are no expressions of this precise form, although there is one with the verb begin:
So the 1840 reading in 3 Nephi 21:9 is possible. On the other hand, there is much more evidence in the text for an existential expression where among is preceded by an indefinite quantifier, either many or some:
These examples suggest that the original text in 3 Nephi 21:9 read as either “there shall be many among them which will not believe it” or “there shall be some among them which will not believe it”. The larger passage implies that many (rather than the weaker some ) would be the more appropriate emendation since the opposition to the Lord’s work and to the servant who will bring it forth will be considerable (as explained in the next verse):
Also note that verse 9 here in 3 Nephi 21 parallels Paul’s language to the nonbelieving Jews in Antioch of Pisidia (in Asia Minor):
(Here Paul is quoting from the Septuagint version of Habakkuk 1:5.) As described in both 3 Nephi 21:9–10 and Acts 13:41, the opposition to the Lord’s work will be substantial; thus many is better than some as a possible emendation (all other things being equal).
Since both the 1830 edition and 𝓟 prior to Joseph Smith’s editing for the 1837 edition read the same (as “and there shall be among them which will not believe it although a man shall declare it unto them”), the original manuscript probably read this way as well. So if many (or some other word) was lost from the text, it must have occurred during the dictation of the text. Note that many looks like among, which suggests that Joseph Smith could have skipped the many as he read off the text to Oliver Cowdery (the presumed scribe here in 𝓞). There is an example of such a visual error elsewhere in the text where Oliver misread among as the visually similar many when he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟:
As explained under Alma 51:7, the word among is definitely the correct reading for that passage. The important point here is that if 3 Nephi 21:9 originally read “there shall be many among them which will not believe it”, many could have been lost because of its visual similarity to the following among. It seems less likely that an original some would have been lost in this environment (or that an original those would have been lost after them). Moreover, there are no explicit examples in the history of the text where some or those have been omitted, but there are two instances in 𝓟 where Oliver Cowdery initially omitted many, although neither of these occurred in the context of the word among:
(There is one case where many was added to the text, not in the manuscripts but in the 1837 edition; see under 4 Nephi 1:27 for discussion of that case.) Thus the loss of many is possible here in 3 Nephi 21:9. The critical text will accept many as the most plausible reading for the original text in this passage.
Summary: Emend 3 Nephi 21:9 to read “and there shall be many among them which will not believe it”; this conjectured reading provides the most reasonable reading for this context since it is supported by usage elsewhere in the text and can be explained as the loss of many in the context of the visually similar among that immediately follows.