Mosiah 29:21 Textual Variants

Here scribe 2 of 𝓟 spelled ye as yea, which Oliver Cowdery corrected when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞. Two other examples of this misspelling in 𝓟 are found in this chapter of Mosiah; these two are in the hand of Hyrum Smith:

• Mosiah 29:5 yea are calleD to consiDDer
• Mosiah 29:29 [ yea > ye 1] Shall cause that …

In the second instance, Hyrum corrected his initial yea. It seems rather surprising that these two scribes are suddenly misspelling ye as yea—not every instance but excessively since nowhere else do they make this spelling error. One wonders here if the scribe in 𝓞 might have been someone other than Oliver Cowdery and that this scribe frequently misspelled ye as yea. Only once in any of his manuscript work did Oliver accidentally write yea instead of ye, and in that instance it was an initial error in 𝓞 that he immediately corrected to ye by erasure:

• Alma 54:7 except [ yea >% ye 0] repent

So the chances are quite small that Oliver would be responsible in 𝓞 for misspelling ye as yea several times within the same part of the text.

Support for the possibility that Oliver Cowdery is not the scribe in 𝓞 for this part of the text comes from Oliver’s second correction in this passage: scribe 2 of 𝓟 originally misread the verb dethrone as death. This misreading seems quite impossible unless the verb dethrone was misspelled in 𝓞 as deathrone (or some similar variant where the initial de was misspelled as dea). Such a misspelling would explain why scribe 2 initially copied the word into 𝓟 as simply death. Scribe 2 quickly figured out that death would not work; but since he couldn’t figure out what 𝓞 actually read, he simply decided to emend death to remove. The verb remove is semantically possible, yet nowhere else does the Book of Mormon text refer to removing someone from office. When Oliver proofed 𝓟 here, he was able to recognize deathrone (or some similar variant) as dethrone; so he corrected scribe 2’s remove to the correct dethrone. Oliver typically spelled the word as dethroan in 𝓞 and as dethrone in 𝓟, but he never misspelled the initial de in dethrone (or in any other word) as dea:

So it seems doubtful that Oliver was responsible for a misspelling such as deathrone in 𝓞. Of course, none of these initial miswritings in 𝓟 affects our interpretation of the text for this passage; but they do seem to provide some evidence that the scribe in 𝓞, for at least the first half of Mosiah 29, was someone other than Oliver Cowdery.