Alma 26:22 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea unto such it shall be given to reveal things which [ 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|have > NULL 1] never have been revealed

𝓞 is extant here and reads “things which never have been revealed”—that is, the negative adverb never precedes the entire verb phrase, “have been revealed”. When copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery started to write “things which have never been revealed”, but he caught his error after writing which have (and perhaps the word never). Virtually immediately he crossed out the have and then continued inline after never with the full verb phrase, “have been revealed”. Either order is possible:

never have

have never

Summary: Accept in Alma 26:22 the word order in 𝓞 (also the immediately corrected word order in 𝓟): “which never have been revealed” (that is, with never preceding the entire verb phrase).

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

References