Mormon 1:16 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and I did endeavor to preach unto [the 1|this ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] people but my mouth was shut

The printer’s manuscript has “unto the people”, but the 1830 edition reads “unto this people”. Elsewhere the text has 18 examples of “preach (un)to the people” and 6 of “preach (un)to this people”. (Here I exclude cases where people is postmodified since we expect only the in such cases.) So both readings in Mormon 1:16 are theoretically possible.

Under Helaman 14:20, I list four independent cases where scribe 2 of 𝓟 replaced this with the. On the other hand, there are no clear cases where the 1830 compositor set this instead of the (there is one case, in Mosiah 1:10, where he set the instead of this). These transmission errors argue that the 1830 reading in Mormon 1:16, “unto this people”, is probably the correct one.

Summary: Retain “unto this people” in Mormon 1:16 (the 1830 reading) rather than “unto the people” (the reading in 𝓟); we have specific evidence that scribe 2 of 𝓟 sometimes accidentally replaced this with the.

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

References