1 Nephi 22:1 Textual Variants

The earliest text has an unusual redundancy (“after I Nephi after that I”), which Joseph Smith removed in his editing for the 1837 edition. The edited version agrees with other usage in the text:

• 1 Nephi 16:1
  • and now it came to pass that after I Nephi had made an end of speaking to my brethren behold they said unto me …
• 1 Nephi 17:7
  • and it came to pass that after I Nephi had been in the land Bountiful for the space of many days the voice of the Lord came unto me saying …
• Nephi 1:1
  • and now it came to pass after I Nephi had made an end of teaching my brethren our father Lehi also spake many things unto them

In these three examples, the subject of the following main clause is not Nephi; thus the subordinate conjunction after necessarily precedes the subject of the subordinate clause “I Nephi”. Similarly, in 1 Nephi 22:1, the after needs to precede the “I Nephi” since the main clause subject is “my brethren”. Thus if there is an early transmission error in this passage, it must be that the words after that I were accidentally added (either in dictating the text or in taking down the dictation). Yet one would think that it would have been easier to have accidentally repeated simply after I, not the longer after that I. The longer form suggests that the repetition, despite its redundancy, is intentional.

There are a couple of other examples where the subordinate conjunction after is used redundantly, but not as egregiously as here in 1 Nephi 22:1. In each case there is an intervening phrase or clause (marked in bold below) that made it necessary to repeat the after-clause:

• 1 Nephi 10:11
  • and after that they had slain the Messiah which should come and after that he had been slain he should rise from the dead
• Alma 3:1
  • and it came to pass that the Nephites which were not slain by the weapons of war after having buried those which had been slain —now the number of the slain were not numbered because of the greatness of their number— and after they had finished burying their dead they all returned to their lands and to their houses and their wives and their children

In 1 Nephi 22:1, the intervening phrase is only a single word (namely, the name Nephi ). Further, in the two other examples the first after-clause is always completed, whereas here in 1 Nephi 22:1, the subject Nephi occurs without any associated verb phrase: “after I Nephi / after that I had read these things”. Nonetheless, the two other examples do suggest that the redundancy in 1 Nephi 22:1 is possible, and thus the critical text will retain the extra “after that I” despite its unusualness.