Although the phrase “see and hear” (and its variants) is very common in the Book of Mormon text (33 times), there is not one occurrence of it in Nephi’s vision of his father’s dream (1 Nephi 11–14). In the previous verse, Nephi does mention that he “heard and bare record that the name of the apostle of the Lamb was John according to the word of the angel” (1 Nephi 14:27)—and it is this use of the verb heard which undoubtedly motivated Oliver Cowdery (while copying from
𝓞 to 𝓟) to add “and heard” in verse 28. Note, however, that the word see was not used in verse 27. Nephi heard the angel pronounce John’s name, but he didn’t see it written.
In 1 Nephi 11–14, when Nephi refers to what he saw, he never conjoins the verb heard. There are 64 uses of the verb see in Nephi’s account but only four occurrences of hear, of which three refer to what Nephi learned—namely, in 1 Nephi 12:4 (“I heard thunderings and earthquakes and all manner of tumultuous noises”), in 1 Nephi 14:5 (“thou also hast heard that whoso repenteth not must perish”), and in 1 Nephi 14:27. (The fourth one, in 1 Nephi 11:28, refers to Jesus’s preaching to the Jews: “and the multitudes were gathered together to hear him”.) Throughout 1 Nephi 14, Nephi consistently refers to what he and John see in vision, never what they hear:
Once more we see how consistent the original text was, even when it could have been written differently.
Summary: Remove Oliver Cowdery’s intrusive “and heard” in 1 Nephi 14:28; whenever Nephi uses the verb see elsewhere in 1 Nephi 11–14, he never conjoins it with the verb hear.