Scribe 3 of 𝓞 wrote “according to my faith which is in me”, an apparent redundancy that Oliver Cowdery emended in the original manuscript by crossing out the me and inserting thee supralinearly (and with considerably weaker ink flow). Such emendations in 𝓞 by another scribe are always secondary, but nonetheless there is the distinct possibility that scribe 3 wrote down the text incorrectly. The phonetic similarity between thee and me, plus the potential influence of the following me (“wilt thou deliver me”), might have caused scribe 3 to write down “which is in me” rather than “which is in thee”.
There are parallel uses elsewhere in the text in support of Oliver Cowdery’s emendation. First consider cases that refer to faith in the Lord:
In addition to these examples that refer to faith in the Lord, the text can also refer to someone’s faith as “the faith which is in someone”:
Notice, however, that this example does not have the redundancy found in the earliest text for 1 Nephi 7:17—that is, the determiner before faith is the, not our. This example suggests another possible emendation for 1 Nephi 7:17—namely, the original text there may have read “the faith which is in me”, but somehow the scribe accidentally replaced the definite article the with my.
Despite these arguments in favor of emending “my faith which is in me”, we do find a few passages in which the Book of Mormon has redundancies similar to the one that scribe 3 of 𝓞 originally wrote in 1 Nephi 7:17:
In all of these examples, we expect the definite article the instead of a possessive pronoun like their, my, or his —thus in the first case, “because of the cursing which was upon them”. In the second case, Mormon has only ten thousand men assigned to him. The following five verses (Mormon 6:11–15) indicate that there were 23 Nephite military leaders at Cumorah, each of which had ten thousand men under his command. Mormon has no additional allotment of ten thousand men. In the third case, the brother of Jared has no other brethren besides those who are with him. Thus the subsequent text refers to these men as simply “his brethren” (that is, without any relative clause modification): “I will forgive thee and thy brethren of their sins” (Ether 2:15) and “the brother of Jared did go to work and also his brethren” (Ether 2:16).
From a communicative perspective, the last two examples differ somewhat from the example in 1 Nephi 7:17. In both of these cases, the relative clause could be considered nonrestrictive rather than restrictive, which would mean that the relative clause acts more as an added explanation and could therefore be paraphrased as follows:
The current text also has one further example of this redundancy (“his promise which he made”), but the original manuscript shows that this reading is actually an error for “this promise which he made”:
In any event, Alma 61:17 shows that we can talk about “the faith which is in someone”. And 2 Nephi 5:24, Mormon 6:10, and Ether 2:15 (but not Alma 51:10) show that redundancies can occur in these kinds of expressions. Since the original reading in 1 Nephi 7:17 is therefore possible, the critical text will restore the earliest text (“my faith which is in me”), even though the earliest text could well be an error for either “the faith which is in me” or “my faith which is in thee”.
Summary: Maintain the earliest textual reading for 1 Nephi 7:17 (“my faith which is in me”), despite the redundancy of the pronominal forms in this passage; such redundancies do occasionally occur elsewhere in the text; one possible emendation is Oliver Cowdery’s (“my faith which is in thee”); yet another is “the faith which is in me” (following the pattern of Alma 61:17).