Alma 36:4 Textual Variants

Oliver Cowdery had considerable difficulty getting down this complex sentence in 𝓞. The transcript for 𝓞 reads as follows:

• Alma 36:3–5 (lines 23–25, page 293ªof 𝓞)

-tions & shall be lifted up at the last day & I would not that ye think that

I know of myself not of thetemporal but of the spiritual not of the Carnal mind (b t) of God now behold I say unto you if U

It appears that when Joseph Smith initially dictated this passage, he read off most of the sentence at once (possibly the part beginning with “that I know of myself” and ending with “not of the carnal mind but of God”, a total of 21 words). The parallelism in this long sentence appears to have led Oliver to accidentally write the later carnal mind too early; that is, Oliver initially wrote “carnal mind but of the spiritual”, which he then crossed out and supralinearly corrected to “temporal but of the spiritual”. Oliver seems to have gotten confused in his crossouts and decided to rewrite this correcting part; he crossed out his supralinear correction, rewrote inline “temporal but of the spiritual”, and then finished writing down inline the last part of the sentence (“not of the carnal mind but of God”), which contained the phrase carnal mind that he had originally anticipated. All of these corrections appear to be immediate since there is no change in the level of ink flow and ultimately the entire correct reading is written inline. There is evidence elsewhere in the text that Joseph sometimes read off too much, with the result that Oliver anticipated the later part of the text by writing it down too early. For an example of anticipation involving 20 words, see under Alma 56:41.

Stan Larson has claimed that here in Alma 36:4 Joseph Smith decided to rephrase the original text, that this was a conscious revision on his part, one of the “efforts by Joseph Smith at the time of the original translation to clarify or restate a thought, indicating his intimate involvement in the process”. See pages 9–10 of his article “Textual Variants in Book of Mormon Manuscripts”, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 10/4 (1977): 8–30. This interpretation of the correction as revision seems doubtful since there are so few examples in the original manuscript that can even serve as candidates for conscious revision by Joseph. Nearly all manuscript corrections in 𝓞 can be explained as Oliver Cowdery’s attempts to get the text down correctly. (On the other hand, there is substantial evidence that Oliver himself occasionally emended the text of 𝓞. See the list of examples under 1 Nephi 20:11.) Here in Alma 36:4, the correction can be explained as resulting from Oliver’s difficulty in writing down a long and complex sentence. Moreover, there is definite evidence for errors of anticipation elsewhere in the original manuscript (see, for instance, the discussion under Alma 56:41). And finally, there would have been no reason for Joseph to have emended the text here in Alma 36:4 since there is nothing wrong with what Oliver initially wrote, “not of the carnal mind but of the spiritual”. Such language is found elsewhere in the text:

• 2 Nephi 9:39
  • to be carnally minded is death and to be spiritual minded is life eternal

In Alma 36:4 it was probably the parallel construction in the original reading that made it especially difficult for Oliver to get the phraseology written down correctly.