Book of Mormon/Textual changes/"white" changed to "pure"

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Criticism

Source(s) of the criticism

• Simon Southerton, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004) 12. ( Index of claims )
• Contender Ministries, Questions All Mormons Should Ask Themselves. Answers

Response

This change was a deliberate editorial change by Joseph Smith to clarify the meaning of the term "white" in the original:

• 2 Nephi 30꞉6 (1830 edition, italics added): "...they shall be a white and a delightsome people."
• 2 Nephi 30꞉6 (1837 edition, italics added): "...they shall be a pure and a delightsome people."

In this edition numerous corrections were made to the text of the 1830 (first) edition to bring it back to the reading in the original and printer's manuscripts. Joseph Smith also made a number of editorial changes to the text, as was his right as the translator of the text.

Joseph probably made this change because he realized that readers were seeing this as a literal issue (i.e., skin color), rather than symbolic (i.e., righteous). The change removed the ambiguity.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, this change went unnoticed in subsequent editions, until the preparation of the 1981 edition. So, the 1981 edition restored a reading that went back to 1837; the change is not (as the critics want to portray it) a "recent" change designed to remove a "racist" original.

Endnotes

None

Further reading

FAIR web site

• FairMormon Topical Guide: Changes in the Book of Mormon FairMormon link
  
• Royal Skousen, "Changes In the Book of Mormon," 2002 FAIR Conference proceedings. FAIR link