Mosiah 2:12–13 Textual Variants

In this passage there are three places where grammatical changes involving negation have been made. In the first case, Joseph Smith (in his editing for the 1837 edition) edited the multiple negative in “nor no manner of riches” to “nor any manner of riches”. In the two other cases, the 1920 LDS edition replaced the conjunction or with nor. For these later two changes, the apparent motivation was to make each of three conjoined clauses begin with the same negative conjunction, nor. Since the first conjoined clause already began with nor (“nor that ye should make slaves one of another”), the two subsequent clause-initial or ’s were changed to nor ’s. Notice that the 1920 edition retained the use of or in the second conjoined clause (“murder or plunder or steal or commit adultery”); here the or is used to connect a list of verbs rather than clauses. The resulting phraseology is quite systematic. We should finally note that in the last case the introduction of nor forced the editors to remove a following not (since that would have created a multiple negative). The editors also changed the word order in the last instance, thus ending up with “nor even have I suffered” instead of the original “or even I have not suffered”. For another example where editing of a negative led to a switch in the word order, see 2 Nephi 33:9.

The edited Book of Mormon text has clearly moved towards removing multiple negatives and increasing the use of the correlative neither-nor construction. The critical text will, of course, restore the earlier instances of negation since they were clearly intended in the original text. Multiple negatives have existed in English since its earliest recorded history, and they continue, of course, in nonstandard speech. For a complete discussion of the editing of negatives in the standard text, see negation in volume 3.