2 Nephi 16:5
1830 Edition
Influences
Changes
Simple English
Then I said: 'I’m in trouble! I am ruined. I am a man with unclean lips. I live with people who have unclean lips. My eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.'
Paraphrase
I cried out, 'I’m done for! I’m a man with a filthy mouth, living among people with filthy mouths. And I’ve just seen the King—the Lord who commands heaven’s armies!'
Notes
2 Nephi 16:5 provides a quality example of Joseph Smith "messing with" italics in the KJV text.
Isaiah 6:5: "Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.
Compare with 2 Nephi 16:5: "Then said I, Wo me! for I am undone; because I a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."
Dr. Stan Larson, former LDS scholar, stated, "The Book of Mormon text often reverses biblical quotations at the very point where the original 1611 editions of the KJV prints the word or words in a different typeface in order to indicate that the words are not found in the Greek. This printing device was both inconsistently and sparsely applied in the 1611 KJV and improved in the 1769 printing. When Smith came to the KJV italics in the Sermon on the Mount, which he knew indicated that whatever was printed in italics was not in the original Greek, he would often either drop the word or revise it. The book of Mormon sometimes revises the KJV italics that are only found in the 1769 and later printings... On the other hand, the Book of Mormon fails to revise places where the KJV text ought to have been printed in italics but not. In two places the Book of Mormon copies the noun "men" from the KJV, where it is not in the original Greek and has been improperly added in the KJV. These considerations prompt one to date the origin of the Book of Mormon account of Jesus' sermon after 1769 and before 1830 when the Book of Mormon was published. This analysis based on textual criticism confirms that... the Book of Mormon text is not a genuine translation from an ancient language but Smith's nineteenth-century targumic expansion of the English KJV." -Stan Larson, "The Historicity of the Matthean Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi," in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon, ed. Brent Metcalf (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993), p. 130-133.