Mosiah 18:22 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and thus he [commandeth >+ commanded 1|commanded ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] them to preach

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote the verb in the present tense (namely, commandeth). Somewhat later, perhaps when proofing against 𝓞, he crossed out the -eth ending and supralinearly inserted the past-tense ending -ed (the level of the ink flow is somewhat heavier). The past tense is used throughout the larger passage, including a preceding occurrence of commanded and a following one (listed as 1 and 3 below):

Oliver probably wrote the second commanded initially as commandeth because the two preceding present-participial clauses seem to imply the present tense: “having one faith and one baptism / having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another”. The critical text will maintain the use of the past-tense commanded throughout this passage.

Summary: Maintain in Mosiah 18:22 the past-tense commanded, the corrected reading in 𝓟; the surrounding text is also in the past tense.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References