Drawing on modern ethnography, scholars often characterize ancient Maya religion as “covenants” involving human beings generating merit through ritual activity in order to repay a primordial debt to the gods. However, models based on modern ethnography alone would not allow us to recognize the impact on Maya religions of those Christian discourses of debt and merit that accompanied sixteenth-century colonization. This article attempts to historicize our understanding of indigenous Mesoamerican theologies by examining how early Colonial indigenous language texts describe moral and ritual obligations to the gods in terms of their societies’ economies. The specific case study here compares two contemporaneous sixteenth-century K'iche' Maya texts: the Popol Wuj by traditionalist K'iche' elites and the Theologia Indorum by the Dominican friar Domingo de Vico. Comparison of these texts’ use of exchange-related lexicon illustrates that the traditionalist theological discourse of the Popol Wuj, which emphasizes reciprocal obligations between different beings within an ontological hierarchy, came to exist alongside Christian K'iche' discourses with a more mercantile religious language of spiritual debt payment. It is argued that these results have potential implications for our assessment of ethnohistorical sources on indigenous theology from elsewhere throughout Mesoamerica as well.

借鉴现代民族志，学者们经常将古代玛雅宗教描述为“契约”，涉及人类通过仪式活动创造功德，以偿还对神的原始债务。然而，仅基于现代民族志的模型无法让我们认识到伴随 16 世纪殖民统治而来的基督教债务和功德话语对玛雅宗教的影响。本文试图通过研究早期殖民地土著语言文本如何根据社会经济描述对神的道德和仪式义务，来历史化我们对中美洲土著神学的理解。这里的具体案例研究比较了两个同时代的 16 世纪 K'iche' 玛雅文本：传统主义 K'iche' 精英的Popol Wuj和多米尼加修道士多明戈·德·维科的《因多鲁姆神学》 。这些文本对交换相关词汇的使用的比较表明， Popol Wuj的传统主义神学话语强调本体论等级中不同存在之间的相互义务，与具有更商业化宗教语言的基督教 K'iche 话语并存。精神债务的偿还。有人认为，这些结果对我们评估整个中美洲其他地方的土著神学的民族历史来源也有潜在的影响。