Scribe 2 of 𝓟 wrote “all shall rise … and be judged according to his works”; in this instance, Oliver Cowdery changed the his to their. Clearly, scribe 2’s text is the harder reading, and it is quite possible that Oliver’s change here represents editing on his part. Of course, 𝓞 itself may have read their and scribe 2 accidentally wrote his. Yet there is no explicit evidence elsewhere that scribe 2 ever mixed up their and his. In fact, there is only one example where this scribe mixed up the number for pronouns, and in that one instance he caught his error:
In this case, it was probably the preceding him (“I will heal him”) that led scribe 2 to write him a second time; but in this later example he immediately caught his error, crossing out the him and then writing the correct them inline. Thus for Alma 11:41, one could argue that the his was the result of the preceding singular noun God (“and stand before God and be judged according to his works”). There is one example in the manuscripts of this kind of error, although the error was made in 𝓞 by Oliver Cowdery and not by scribe 2 of 𝓟:
In this case, Oliver immediately caught his error in 𝓞, erased the his, and overwrote it with the correct their. But there are no instances of scribe 2 of 𝓟 ever making this particular kind of error.
Elsewhere the text definitely prefers the plural their when referring to people being judged according to their works (16 times). In several cases, the language is similar to that of Alma 11:41, including instances where there is a preceding occurrence of all:
In referring to the judgment of people, the only other time the text has his works is when there is a preceding instance of the grammatically singular every man; yet only the second of the following actually has his in the earliest text:
The language in 2 Nephi 29:11 is supported by the following biblical passage:
The example from Mosiah 3:24 suggests another possible emendation for Alma 11:41: namely, the original text in Alma 11:41 may have read “all shall rise from the dead and stand before God and be judged / every man according to his works”. In other words, it is possible that 𝓞 itself was missing every man; thus Oliver’s decision to emend his to their in 𝓟 may have been his own attempt to deal with a difficult reading in 𝓞. On the other hand, it seems unusual that such a specific noun phrase as every man would have been omitted from 𝓞.
There are instances in the original text where the plural all can take singular pronouns. The examples involve the noun phrase all things and the singular pronoun it (including a nearby example in Alma 11:44):
There appears to be another instance of this usage in the original text:
In this last passage we have two later corrections that Oliver Cowdery made in 𝓞; the ink flow for the two supralinear their ’s is uneven and distinctly different from the inline text. In other words, Oliver seems to have later edited the two singular determiners his and its to the plural their, which would thus support the hypothesis that Oliver’s change of his to their here in Alma 11:41 was due to editing on his part. (See under Alma 41:4 for a complete discussion of that more complicated case.)
Thus the examples of “all things ... it/its” in the original text argue that in Alma 11:41 scribe 2’s “all shall ... be judged according to his works” was actually the original reading, which would then imply that Oliver Cowdery on his own emended the his to their in Alma 11:41. The original reading in 𝓟, although difficult, seems to be intended. The critical text will therefore restore the original reading in 𝓟: “all shall rise from the dead and stand before God and be judged according to his works”. Perhaps Oliver felt that the phrase his works could be misinterpreted as referring to God’s works.
Summary: Restore in Alma 11:41 the original reading in 𝓟: “all shall rise from the dead and stand before God and be judged according to his works”; Oliver Cowdery’s correction of his to their appears to be the result of editing on his part.