Fill in the Middle Ground: Intertextuality and Interreligious Dialogue in 16th-Century Guatemala

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Garry Sparks

Abstract

Despite the rich paper trail from Mesoamerica, the roles and historical, 


ethnographic, and theological contributions by Spanish missionaries have 


remained underappreciated by most scholars. Few ethno-historians have access to historical material written by indigenous groups during or immediately after the periods of first encounters with Europeans. However, unlike other indigenous American peoples, the Maya of Mesoamerica developed a phonetic writing system prior to contact with Europeans as part of their linguistic ideology that enabled them to appropriate the mendicant alphabet and quickly generate their own manuscripts. This article proposes that a comparative theological study based on intertextual analysis of indigenous and non-native materials that emerge from periods of first encounters can provide historical resources for current ethnohistorical and theological work.  In addition to providing a thick case example of Christianity’s engagement with cultural and religious others for further comparative work, this article provides a reconstructed record of an interreligious dialogue rarely available as a historical resource to comparative theology.

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