Who did it???
I must admit I'm a bit upset right now. You see, "I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book." (Joseph Smith, History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols., introduction and notes by B. H. Roberts [Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1932-1951], 4: 461.) But since then someone has gone through and changed some of the content of the Book of Mormon.
In the 1830 edition (which I was speaking about when I said that) it says:
And he said unto me, Behold, the virgin which thou seest, is the mother of God, after the manner of the flesh.(The Book of Mormon, translated by Joseph Smith, Jr. [Palmyra, N.Y.: Joseph Smith, Jr., 1830], 25.)
But today it says:
And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh. (1 Nephi 11:18)
Who added that? I didn't record that when I was translating the Book of Mormon! Martin Harris was there, he "said that the Prophet possessed a seer stone, by which he was enabled to translate as well as from the Urim and Thummim, and for convenience he then used the seer stone. Martin explained the translation as follows: By aid of the seer stone, sentences would appear and were read by the prophet and written by Martin, and when finished he would say, `Written,' and if correctly written, that sentence would disappear and another appear in its place, but if not written correctly it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates, precisely in the language then used. (George Reynolds, The Myth of the Manuscript Found: Faith-Promoting Series, no. 11 [Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1883], 91.)
If the translation was already correct, why was it changed?