4 Nephi 1:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and there was no contentions [𝓢① & >+ 𝓢② nor > & 1|and ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] disputations among them

Oliver Cowdery, when he was proofing 𝓟 against 𝓞, initially thought “no contentions and disputations” was an error for “no contentions nor disputations”, so he changed scribe 2 of 𝓟’s ampersand to nor. But then in checking 𝓞 more closely, he realized that the text indeed read “no contentions and disputations”, so he restored the correct reading, and. The 1830 edition (set from 𝓞 for this part of the text) reads and, thus supporting the occurrence of and in 𝓞.

There are no other examples in the text of the construction “no X and Y”, where X and Y are nouns. There is, however, one example of “no X and no Y”:

On the other hand, there are numerous examples of “no X nor Y”, what we expect in English:

Thus it is not surprising that Oliver initially replaced the and with nor in 4 Nephi 1:2. Clearly, 𝓞 itself read and; and since that reading is theoretically possible, the critical text will accept it despite its uniqueness in the text.

Summary: Maintain in 4 Nephi 1:2 the occurrence of and in the negative conjunctive noun phrase “no contentions and disputations” (the reading of the earliest textual sources).

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 6

References