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Mormon 7:10 · 2 Nephi 31:14

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Book of Mormon Mormon 7:10
"ye believe in Christ, and are baptized, first with water, then with fire and with the Holy Ghost, following the example of our Savior, according to that which he hath commanded us"
Book of Mormon 2 Nephi 31:14
"witnessed unto the Father that ye are willing to keep my commandments, by the baptism of water, and have received the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost"

Mormon's closing charge to the latter-day remnant restates the doctrine of Christ's water-then-fire gate-sequence one last time: 'if it so be that ye believe in Christ, and are baptized, first with water, then with fire and with the Holy Ghost, following the example of our Savior, according to that which he hath commanded us' (Mormon 7:10). What is distinctive about Mormon 7:10 is the ORDINAL water-THEN-fire sequence ('first with water, then with fire') delivered as the Savior's own example/command -- and that ordered sequence is the doctrine's signature, stated in the voice of the Son at 2 Nephi 31:14 ('by the baptism of water, and have received the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost') and by Nephi at 2 Nephi 31:17 ('baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost'). The alternative candidate, 3 Nephi 11:35 ('for he will visit him with fire and with the Holy Ghost'), offers a TIGHTER verbatim string -- Mormon 7:10 and 11:35 share the exact seven-word phrase 'with fire and with the Holy Ghost' -- but 11:35 carries only the FIRE-half: no water, no sequence, and its subject is the Father bearing record, not the ordered gate. Decisive point against 11:35: 'with fire and with the Holy Ghost' is a RECURRING corpus formula, not a distinctive one -- in the record it occurs at 3 Nephi 9:20 (twice), 11:35, 12:1, 12:2, Mormon 7:10, and Ether 12:14; corpus-wide Moses 6:66's same-order comma'd form ('Thou art baptized with fire, and with the Holy Ghost') joins them -- counted comma-tolerant (punctuation-only variants are the same phrase), seven verses / eight occurrences in this word order (the Ether hit further reinforces that the formula is common). So the verbatim collision with 11:35 is on a common idiom, whereas the water-then-fire SEQUENCE (the load-bearing content) matches 2 Nephi 31:14/31:17. This is a paraphrase rather than shared-phrasing because Mormon's 'with…with' and Nephi's 'of…of' function words differ; the shared contiguous string longer than 'the Holy Ghost' does not survive between 7:10 and 31:14 -- the match is the ordered baptismal formula + the Savior's-example framing, not a distinctive verbatim string (that string belongs to the runner-up). 'first with water' occurs only at Mormon 7:10 in the corpus. Mormon 7:10's 'following the example of our Savior' also echoes the doctrine's founding argument that the Messiah's own baptism sets the pattern (2 Nephi 31:5-9).

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