Alma 27:24 Textual Variants

As discussed under Mosiah 19:15, the original text always refers to conditions (that is, in the plural), never to condition. Modern-day readers expect the singular in the phrase “on condition that”, thus the 1920 LDS edition’s change to the “on condition that”. This 1920 change was intentional since it was marked in the copy of the 1911 edition used by the 1920 committee to emend the LDS text.

In the typesetting for the 1837 edition, the that which follows “on conditions” was omitted, probably accidentally. Elsewhere in the text, whenever conditions is followed by a clause, the subordinate that is present, although there are only two other examples:

• Mosiah 19:15
  • under the conditions that they would deliver up the king Noah into the hands of the Lamanites and deliver up their property even one half of all they possessed
• Alma 54:11
  • save it be on conditions that ye will deliver up a man and his wife and his children for one prisoner

Here in Alma 27:24, the 1920 LDS edition restored the original that to the LDS text; on the other hand, the RLDS text has never restored the that, even though it is extant in 𝓟 and was not crossed out by Joseph Smith when he edited 𝓟 for the 1837 edition.

One might wonder here whether this example in Alma 27:24 should actually read “on the conditions”, as in the preceding example in Alma 17:15 (“on the conditions of repentance”). Spacing considerations for Alma 27:24 indicate that the last line on this page of 𝓞 ended with the word on; there is no room for a the except by sublinear or supralinear insertion. On the other hand, the word conditions appears to have begun the next page of 𝓞 (in accord with spacing between extant fragments). So it is possible that when copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery accidentally omitted the last word, a the, if it were indeed there in 𝓞.

Usually the word conditions takes some kind of determiner (such as the, any, what, and these). However, in two cases besides Alma 27:24, there is no determiner: “only on conditions of repentance” (in Alma 42:13) and “on conditions that …” (in Alma 54:11). In the first case, the original manuscript is extant and there is no the. In the second case, the original manuscript is not extant, but spacing considerations indicate that the could have been there only as a supralinear insertion; most probably, there was no the for this phrase in the original manuscript. Thus there is no strong evidence that “on conditions” in Alma 27:24 is a mistake for “on the conditions”. The critical text will assume that the original manuscript page in 𝓞 for Alma 27:24 ended with on and not on the.