1 Nephi 14:27 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and I Nephi heard and bare record that the name [& 0|of the 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] apostle of the Lamb was John

Oliver Cowdery could not make sense out of scribe 2’s use of and in the original manuscript, so in 𝓟 he wrote of the instead. The reading of the original manuscript does seem quite impossible, even as a mishearing, so some reinterpretation seems necessary.

Undoubtedly, Oliver Cowdery’s emendation is correct. The phraseology “name of the X” (where X is a common noun) is quite frequent in the original text, occurring 14 other times, including these four with the same basic clausal phraseology:

No other emendation seems plausible in 1 Nephi 14:27.

Summary: Accept in 1 Nephi 14:27 Oliver Cowdery’s emendation of “the name and apostle of the Lamb” to “the name of the apostle of the Lamb”; no other emendation seems possible.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 1

References