Translated Christianities. Mark Z. Christensen

Collection as “The Nahuatl Bible” provides an excellent example of a Nahua-authored religious text that received virtually no oversight from religious authorities. The anonymous text is a sermon recounting a Nahua version of the conversion of Saint Paul and the ministry of Saint Sebastian and dates to sometime before 1560. The manuscript itself spans eight folios, or sixteen pages, and has two vellum sheets sewn on either side that serve as its cover. Interestingly, the manuscript contains sixty-four profiles of Nahua heads on the front pastedown, which is made of amatl, or fig-tree bark paper (see fig. 1). Over the years various scholars have proposed diverse explanations for the heads that range from tributaries to actors in a play. Yet when composing manuscript works, authors sometimes employed pieces of heavier paper to make covers.¹ Thus, it is possible, and even likely, that the heads correspond with a separate work altogether and not the sermon. The manuscript fails to reveal its origins, and today resides in Europe as part of the Schøyen Collection, MS 1692.²

A variety of evidence exists to confidently suggest the Nahua authorship of the sermon. First and foremost, the sermon contains numerous deviances regarding the history and lives of Saint Paul and Saint Sebastian—deviances that a priest would never have allowed knowingly. In the Bible, Paul was once Saul, a Pharisee who zealously persecuted Christians in the first century and even witnessed the stoning of the prophet Stephen. When traveling to Damascus on a mission to arrest Christians, “suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven, and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ And he said, ‘Who art thou, Lord?’ And the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.’ ” The encounter caused Saul to lose his sight until his companions took him to Damascus, where the Christian, Ananias, blessed him. Saul then became baptized and began a lifelong ministry preaching of Christ. The moment at which Saul adopted the name Paul is unclear, but it was not at his baptism.³

Adding to the biblical history of Paul is the Vision of Saint Paul, which relates Paul’s visit to heaven and hell in a vision to witness the rewards of the righteous and the punishment of the damned. Reportedly, versions of the text first appeared in Latin Antiquity in Greek, then in Latin; subsequent renditions in the vernacular then emerged throughout Western Europe. Dante even references Paul’s vision in his fourteenth-century Divine Comedy.⁴ Although various religious authorities expressed their doubts as to its doctrinal validity, the tale was popular and very influential during the Middle Ages, and many of the friars who trained the Nahuas in religion and writing certainly would have been familiar with its contents.⁵ That the friars used such tales to instruct the Nahuas is very likely, especially when considering that similar medieval stories were used to educate the Yucatec Mayas (see chapter 2).

Our knowledge of Saint Sebastian derives not from the Bible but from later hagiographies (biographies of saints and religious leaders) and texts that became popular in the Middle Ages, such as Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend (ca. 1260). At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards in Mexico, The Golden Legend was available in Spanish as the Flos sanctorum. According to these works, Sebastian died as a Christian martyr in 287 A.D. at the orders of the Roman emperor Diocletian and, subsequently, at the hands of Roman soldiers who shot him with arrows. After Sebastian miraculously survived the arrows and reprimanded Diocletian, the emperor ordered Sebastian beaten to death and his body thrown in a sewer.⁶

The Nahuatl sermon, which itself resembles a hagiography, alters nearly every part of these two accounts (see tables 1 and 2).⁷ The religious training of the Nahua author(s) surely provided a familiarity with Saint Paul and Saint Sebastian. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Psalmodia christiana (1583) describes the life of Sebastian in some detail.⁸ Moreover, the Flos sanctorum was a “best seller” of sorts and commonplace among the libraries of ecclesiastics and the laity of central Mexico.⁹ Yet the Nahua author(s) alter various elements of the individual story lines. For example, in the sermon Paul and his followers kill Sebastian with arrows; an event strangely familiar with Paul witnessing the stoning of Stephen. And whereas the Vision of Saint Paul recounts a vision awarded to a converted Paul for his righteousness, in the Nahuatl sermon Paul is a sinner who not only witnesses the torments of hell but also is a victim of them.

      In other instances, the Nahuatl sermon adds elements to the story lines to serve its own didactic agenda—in this case, the cessation of idolatry and the promotion of Christian virtues. As a result, Paul the Pharisee becomes an idolater who tries to kill Sebastian, is turned to dust, goes to heaven and hell, miraculously regains his body, burns his idols, and is baptized by Peter. On the other hand, Sebastian—whose role of sweeping the roads to heaven parallels Nahua culture, where precontact priests regularly swept the temples of their gods—is shot by Paul with arrows and subsequently preaches repentance to nobles with strong Nahua characteristics. Above all, the Nahuatl text transports, however figuratively, these two prophets to the Americas, where they speak, dress, and behave like—and, for all intents and purposes, become—Nahuas.

The early date of the sermon and its goal to reform the Nahuas, particularly the nobility, remind us of the concerted effort among ecclesiastics in the 1530s to reform many of the baptized Nahua nobility who continued to practice precontact traditions that conflicted with Christianity—specifically polygamy, idolatry, and avaricious living. Trained Nahua youth were often the messengers of such reform, and certain Nahuas, such as don Carlos Ometochtli, scoffed at the audaciousness of such young boys in instructing them to relinquish their idolatry and polygamy.¹⁰ Although the assertion is speculative, it is tempting to consider this sermon as reflective of the messages these young religious assistants brought to the ears of the Nahua nobility.

The Nahua authorship and influence of the text also emerges in its native rhetoric and misspelling of common Spanish words (such as “diaplos” or “tiablos” for diablos). Interestingly, the orthography and penmanship of the sermon indicates that two individual Nahua hands wrote the script, suggesting that the sermon we have today is a copy of a separate Nahua-authored manuscript.¹¹ Regardless, the Nahuatl sermon itself represents an excellent example of those texts ecclesiastical authorities would surely have confiscated had they known about them or their contents. Here, it seems the goal of the Nahua author(s) was not to replicate a doctrinally accurate account of the conversion of Saint Paul or the ministry of Saint Sebastian but rather to use these figures in didactic stories that aligned more evenly with