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Maya Christian Tales

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 and autonomous nature of the text itself renders it technically unofficial and forbidden.

The manuscript contains a variety of writings on Christian subjects, including a series of short stories, six of which are included here. In her initial analysis of the manuscript, Whalen noted that some of its short stories were biblical, while others appeared in the texts of Jacobus and Sánchez.⁹ After further searching, I succeeded in connecting each of the six stories to either a biblical account or a story found in the earlier works of Jacobus, Sánchez, Saint Gregory, Jacques de Vitry, and others. The shortened, abbreviated nature of the stories in the Morley Manuscript compared to their medieval or biblical counterparts suggests that their original Maya author either composed them from memory or took great liberty with their redactions instead of providing a direct translation from text. To illustrate the influence of Maya culture on the tales, I include some brief commentary at the beginning of each of the six stories, comparing the Yucatec Maya version of the tale to its medieval or biblical counterpart.

All the stories found in the Morley Manuscript cover topics and themes relevant to the Maya Christians of colonial Yucatan. In addition to the overarching theme of living a true Christian lifestyle, the tales translated here speak to the specific topics of chastity, the supreme power of God, testaments, idolatry, confession, and the punishment of the wicked in purgatory and hell—themes that appeared repeatedly in religious texts throughout the colonial period. In fact, many of the sections found within the Morley Manuscript also appear in other Maya works, both unpublished and published. The Books of Chilam Balam—Maya-authored manuscripts containing a variety of topics pertaining to Maya culture and history—from the towns of Kaua and Chan Kan both contain sections similar to those found in the Morley Manuscript, and some sections of fray Juan Coronel’s 1620 Discursos predicables follow the manuscript nearly word for word, including some of the stories translated here.¹⁰

Writing in a style similar to the composition of European exempla, Maya authors frequently engaged in a kind of “text sharing/borrowing.” For example, cognate versions of a redaction of the creation of the world, or “Genesis Commentary,” can be found in the Chilam Balams of Kaua and Chan Kan, the Morley Manuscript, and in a newly discovered manuscript from Teabo.¹¹ These instances of borrowing among Maya texts should not be considered plagiarism by modern standards. Instead, the borrowing of stories was commonplace in both New Spain and Europe, as many authors borrowed from one another’s work to produce similar tales.¹² In general, it is clear that genres popular to the Mayas—such as these didactic stories or the “Genesis Commentary”—were widely circulated among the unofficial texts of the Mayas.

Overall, the Morley Manuscript and its short stories are an important link in a chain connecting didactic religious stories from the initial centuries of Christianity in Europe to the colonial period in the Americas. Indeed, it is incredible to consider that these short stories—some of which date back to at least the fourth century—made their way across the European continent and the Atlantic to appear in colonial Maya texts located in small native towns in remote Yucatan! Although such tales no doubt continued in oral tradition, their appearance on paper diminished beginning in the seventeenth century, as ecclesiastics increasingly became wary of the “superstitious” and “unorthodox” material these stories contained.¹³ As far as I can tell, such stories in Yucatec Maya last appeared, at least in official printed works, in Coronel’s 1620 Discursos predicables, although some continued in unofficial manuscripts well beyond the colonial period.

Saint Justina

This first story is a love story of sorts. It tells of a man, Cyprian, who in his desperate attempts to be with the virgin Justina requests the assistance of the devil. But despite his attempts the devil has no power over Justina because of her “true Christianity.” Seeing the superior power of the righteous over the devil, Cyprian converts to Christianity. The story ends by instructing the Maya audience that “true” or worthy Christians need not fear devils or their temptations.