Translated Christianities. Mark Z. Christensen
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people, may you be merciful with them O lord.”
Then our lord God himself replied to him and said to him in turn, “O Sebastian, weep no longer, no longer be so sad. I saw the wicked, you did not sin; you redeemed yourself, you did your duty. They broke my commandments on their own.... Try them again!15 Never... was in vain... when no longer they consent, you are to tell me again.”
After our lord had declared this to him, then... replied... Sebastian told him..., “Thank you, let me try them out again.”
Then, he goes to try them; when he reached the people he said to them, “Listen you people! You say you really do not love the words, the commandments of our lord God. Today I came at his bidding; maybe I will try you out another time. May you judge it well!”
1. An excellent example would be the 1713 manuscript of Joseph Antonio Pérez de la Fuente’s manuscript “Relación mercurina,” no. 10, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Garrett Collection of Mesoamerican Manuscripts (C0744), Princeton University Library.
2. The manuscript is mentioned in Gómez de Orozco, Catálogo, 157–58; Glass, “Census,” 175; and Horcasitas, Teatro náhuatl, 447–59, 601–3, which includes a transcription and loose Spanish translation of the text by Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca. My transcription, however, varies from that found in Horcasitas’s work.
3. Acts 9:3–5, 10 (AV). Not until Acts 13:9 is Saul referred to as Paul.
4. See, for example, Dante, Inferno, canto 2, line 32.
5. For more of a comparison of the Nahuatl and medieval tale, see Christensen, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms, 199. Silverstein provides an excellent study of the text in his Visio Sancti Pauli. See also Sautman, Conchado, and Di Scipio, Telling Tales, 109–10. The act of God showing a sinner the pains of hell to inspire repentance was a common theme in many European didactic tales throughout the Middle Ages (see chapter 2). For a few examples, see Gayangos, Escritores, 478–79.
6. Flos sanctorum, fols. 40r–42r; Jacobus, Golden Legend, 50–54.
7. Morgan explains the close and symbiotic relationship between sermons and hagiographies in his Spanish American Saints, 35–36.
8. Sahagún, Psalmodia christiana, 47–51.
9. Fernández del Castillo, Libros y libreros, 55, 264–81; Nesvig, Ideology and Inquisition, 237–41; Mathes, First Academic Library, 4–5. Interestingly, the Inquisition banned the 1558 edition printed in Zaragoza.
10. Don, Bonfires of Culture, 167, 89. For more on the Franciscan’s morals campaign, see ibid., 146–74, and Gruzinski, Man-Gods, 31–62.
11. Philologically and orthographically the manuscript points to distinct preferences among the native writers. Both writers tend to use abbreviations incorrectly and interchange the u and the n throughout. The first writer is prone to omit syllables, which sometimes he catches and writes in. Also confirming the early date of the text is its occasional use of the huehuetlatolli form of rhetoric in a phrase for “thank you.” My thanks to James Lockhart for his insights.
12. Nahua municipal community or town.
13. Unknown epithet.
14. Ipalnemohuani. This is an epithet for Nahua creator deities such as Tezcatlipoca and even Quetzalcoatl.
15. Here and in a few other places the manuscript has been damaged by water, rendering a transcription and translation of certain words difficult, if not impossible.
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All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them.
—Matthew 13:34
As seen in the previous chapter, religious texts employed stories, however unorthodox, to convey their messages. The short story is perhaps the most enduring and popular genre of didactic literature throughout time. Aesop, Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, and the Brothers Grimm all understood the value of an engaging tale—whether fictitious or factual—to convey a message or simply to entertain. The efficacy of the short story to educate was not lost on Christianity. Indeed, in the New Testament, Christ himself mastered the genre with his use of parables intended to inspire and instruct. Throughout the Middle Ages, the short story and hagiography genres blended nearly seamlessly in various European works such as Saint Gregory’s Dialogues (590s) and Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend (ca. 1260).1 Other medieval works, including Clemente Sánchez de Vercial’s early fifteenth-century The Book of Tales by A. B. C. and later editions of History of the Maiden Teodora, also employed short stories to convey Christian morals.2 Furthermore, illustrative stories, or exempla, in religious texts, particularly sermons, were designed to provide contemporary examples of ancient doctrine.3 Spaniards embraced the genre, and numerous works appeared in the vernacular.4
Many of these manuscripts saw print throughout the early modern period and influenced the Spanish ecclesiastics who would carry such works across the Atlantic to the Americas.5 Here, in some form or another, the dialogues of Saint Gregory, the legends of Jacobus, the tales of Sánchez, and the popular stories of the maiden Teodora and Emperor Hadrian would find their way into the Yucatecan schools established to train the sons of the Maya nobility in reading, writing, and religion. As a result of their exposure to these stories, Maya authors occasionally included them in their works.6 The Maya stories translated here provide examples of this occurrence.
The following stories derive from a Maya manuscript of unknown authorship and origin commonly referred to as the Morley Manuscript. The date 1576 is located within the manuscript’s pages and much of the text does seem to originate in the early colonial period.7 Centuries later Sylvanus Morley would acquire the manuscript and bequeath it to the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gretchen Whalen’s recent transcription and translation of the text has pulled the manuscript out of relative obscurity and opened the door for further insights into early colonial Yucatec Maya writing. Whalen suggests that the text, and its rhetoric, orthography, and content, betrays its author as a Maya maestro serving as a schoolmaster who frequently refers to his audience as “young men.”8 Thus, although the intentions of the text revolved around the evangelization of its audience, the manuscript