Textual changes, 1830 to 1981

Thousands of edits are mostly trivial, but a handful made by Joseph himself in 1837 and 1840 alter what the text says about God and about race.

What the Church claims

Joseph Smith called the Book of Mormon 'the most correct of any book on earth'; the Church says later changes are corrections of grammar, spelling and printer's errors.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Contested. The 'thousands of changes' headline is mostly noise, since the great majority are spelling and punctuation. What survives is narrower and harder: three or four doctrinally significant edits made in Joseph's own lifetime, enough to contest 'the most correct book on earth' without overturning it.

The record

  • The Church's own 1983 Ensign article acknowledges 'literally thousands of corrections', more than 1,000 of them in the 1837 edition.
  • Royal Skousen counts about 105,000 places of variation across the two manuscripts and 20 editions (a figure he calls misleading because most are punctuation and spelling) and says no error 'significantly' interferes with doctrine.
  • In 1837 Joseph inserted 'the Son of' into four passages in 1 Nephi 11-13 that had called Jesus 'the Eternal Father' and Mary 'the mother of God'. The Ensign says he 'did intentionally add to the text to clarify'; Skousen suggests he may have disliked the 'Catholic sounding' phrase.
  • Mosiah 21:28 and Ether 4:1 originally named King Benjamin as the living seer where the narrative requires Mosiah; the name was changed. The Ensign calls it 'an inadvertent slip' or possibly Mormon's own error.
  • 2 Nephi 30:6 read 'white and a delightsome people' in 1830. Joseph changed it to 'pure' in 1840, LDS editions descended from the British printing kept 'white' until 1981, and Skousen judges 'white' to be the original reading.
  • Skousen finds that Joseph's 1837 editing was heaviest in the first hundred pages, modernized the language, and that Joseph 'did not realize how systematic the original text was'.

The moving target

  • 1983-12: Changes are corrections and clarifications; 'most correct' refers to doctrine, not style.
  • 1981: Restored Joseph's 1840 reading 'pure' at 2 Nephi 30:6.

The exchange

Royal Skousen; George Horton (Ensign); FAIR

Critics' headline number (the Tanners' 3,913 changes) is almost entirely spelling, punctuation and grammar. The few substantive edits are clarifications: 'the Son of' removes ambiguity, because the book elsewhere also calls Christ both Father and Son; Benjamin/Mosiah is a slip; and 'pure' restores Joseph's own 1840 correction.

The answer: Correct on the count, and critics who lead with the raw number mislead. The substantive handful still matters. The 1 Nephi 11-13 edits move four modalist-sounding statements toward the separate-persons Godhead Joseph was teaching by 1837; this tracks his theological development (see the First Vision and Godhead entries). The Benjamin error is an author's continuity slip: Benjamin's death had been narrated in Mosiah 6, and under the word-for-word dictation Skousen defends it cannot be Joseph's paraphrase. And on Skousen's own evidence 'white' is the original reading at 2 Nephi 30:6, so the 1840/1981 'pure' softens the text rather than restores it.

What they get right: Skousen's critical text project is genuinely rigorous, openly published and often restores readings that are awkward for believers. Most changes are trivial.

Royal Skousen; George Horton, Ensign (1983)

The Church has been unusually transparent about this. It published Skousen's critical text project, which prints every variant, and ran an Ensign article explaining the changes.

The answer: The Ensign article came fifteen years after the Tanners published the changes, and that order is the whole point. Transparency about the count also does not answer the two edits that carry the argument: 'the mother of God' becoming 'the mother of the Son of God' in 1837 changes what the 1830 text asserts about the Godhead, and 'white and delightsome' becoming 'pure and delightsome' changes what it asserts about skin. The claim under test is that the changes are grammar and printer's errors. Most of them are. These are not, and describing them as clarifications names the act incorrectly: an author revised his doctrine.

What they get right: Skousen's critical text is a real scholarly achievement, and the Tanners' figure of 3,913 changes is indeed dominated by punctuation and spelling.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Set the number aside. The edits that matter were made by Joseph Smith himself, to a text he said was given by the gift and power of God, and they run in one direction: toward his later theology (1 Nephi 11-13) and away from embarrassment (2 Nephi 30:6). Skousen's own finding that the original text was revealed word for word but that Joseph then edited it as a 'human editor' who did not grasp its systematic character leaves believers holding that God dictated 'mother of God' and 'white and delightsome' and the prophet then changed them.

The apologetic case

An author or translator clarifying his own first edition is normal, the Church has been transparent through Skousen's publications, and no edit introduces a doctrine absent from the rest of the 1830 text, which already calls Jesus both the Son and the Father.

What would change this

Manuscript evidence that 'the Son of' or 'pure' stood in the original dictation and was dropped by a scribe.

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.