Here in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “to Amalickiah and those which were with him”. Almost immediately Oliver corrected the were to fled (there is no difference in the ink flow for the supralinearly inserted fled). The source for the were in the first relative clause (listed above as 1) seems to have been the relative clause (listed above as 2) in the following sentence: “for behold he had took those which were with him”. When Oliver copied the first relative clause, “which fled with him into the wilderness”, from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he accidentally added the perfect auxiliary had (giving “which had fled with him into the wilderness”). Here Oliver seems to have been influenced by the following perfect usage in “for behold he had took those”. The critical text will restore the original simple past-tense fled in this first relative clause: “which fled with him into the wilderness”.
Yet another verb affected the transmission of the text for this passage. When Oliver Cowdery wrote the second relative clause in 𝓞, he once more let the following text influence him: instead of writing “which were with him”, he initially wrote “which went with him”, undoubtedly because of the went in the following conjoined predicate (“and went up into the land of Nephi among the Lamanites”). Multispectral imaging shows that Oliver initially wrote went (“which went with him”), then erased the nt and overwrote it with an r, and ended up writing the final e inline (giving “which were with him”). Nonetheless, the resulting overwritten word is not all that clear and could be misread as went. When Oliver copied this relative clause from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he once more allowed himself to be influenced by the subsequent went in “and went up”. Thus we end up with a somewhat redundant (although not impossible) reading in 𝓟: “he had took those which went with him and went up into the land of Nephi among the Lamanites”. Elsewhere the text has a good number of examples of relative clauses where the predicate is of the form “to be with someone” (20 of them). But there are also examples of relative clauses where the predicate is of the form “to go with someone” (7 of them), such as Mosiah 21:30: “and they also did mourn for the death of Abinadi and also for the departure of Alma and the people that went with him”. But when the predicate in the main clause refers to the movement of those mentioned in a preceding relative clause, that relative clause always has the verb be rather than go:
The proposed original text for Alma 47:1 is consistent with this regularity:
The apparent correction here in 𝓞 of went to were, plus the preceding initial error in 𝓞 of “those which were with him” instead of “those which fled with him”, argues that in the original text the second relative clause in Alma 47:1 read “which were with him”.
Summary: Restore in Alma 47:1 the two corrected readings in 𝓞 for the verbs in the relative clauses: fled instead of the initial were (or the had fled that Oliver Cowdery copied into 𝓟); and (2) were instead of the initial went (which Oliver reintroduced into the text when he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟); the original text here read “now we will return in our record to Amalickiah and those which fled with him into the wilderness / for behold he had took those which were with him and went up into the land of Nephi among the Lamanites”.