“It came to pass” appears more than a thousand times in the Book of Mormon.

This is no surprise to anyone who has read the book from cover-to-cover.

About nine years following the 1828-9 writing of the Original Manuscript, and after immense criticism, Joseph Smith personally removed forty-one instances of these overused words in preparation for the next printed edition.

The 1830 first printed edition contains these additional forty-one instances. This 164-word modification is only a small dose of the hundreds of other changes made by Joseph Smith for the 1837 printing.