Alma 8:11–12 Textual Variants

In his copywork here in 𝓟, scribe 2’s eye skipped down from the first “we are not of thy church” to the second one; thus scribe 2 ended up writing an extra “we know that thou hast no power over us”, which Oliver Cowdery later crossed out when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞 (the lines used to cross out the text are characteristic of Oliver’s crossouts, not scribe 2’s). Somehow scribe 2 was able to recover sufficiently from this textual anticipation to include the text that he had initially skipped (“and we do not believe in such foolish traditions and now we know that because we are not of thy church”), but he himself did not cross out the dittography.

Interestingly, this error itself supports the reading of the final sentence where the clause “we know that” is repeated: “and now we know that because we are not of thy church / we know that thou hast no power over us”. Otherwise, we might have supposed that only the subordinate conjunction that would have been repeated, as if the text read “and now we know that because we are not of thy church that thou hast no power over us”. Here in Alma 8:11–12, the intervening because-clause motivates the clausal repetition. As another example of this kind of redundancy, consider the repetitive “that they should commence” in the following passage:

• Alma 50:1
  • And now it came to pass that Moroni did not stop making preparations for war or to defend themselves against the Lamanites for he caused that his armies should commence in the commencement of the twentieth year of the reign of the judges that they should commence in digging up heaps of earth round about all the cities throughout all the land which was possessed by the Nephites

Once more there is some intervening text that leads to the clausal repetition, in this case “in the commencement of the twentieth year of the reign of the judges”.