One of the first ways Jesus is described is as a king. In the Gospel of Matthew, upon Jesus’s birth, the Magi come to Jerusalem asking, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and come to worship him.” In this familiar story, which is unique to Matthew among the gospels and which reflects the story of Moses in Exodus, the region’s king, Herod, panics upon hearing of this apparent threat to his own rule and orders the slaughter of all boys under the age of two.

Escaping with Mary and Joseph to Egypt and only returning after Herod’s death, Jesus grows up in Galilee and ultimately establishes a very different example of kingship. He never leads any armies into Jerusalem, but rather travels with a small group of disciples, several of whom are fishermen, sleeping wherever they can and eating with whomever will offer them hospitality. He issues no decrees, but as he speaks with those he meets along the way, challenging some and healing others, his reputation increases nonetheless. He builds no palaces, columns, or triumphal arches to justify himself, instead asking, “Who do you say I am?”

How is it, then, that throughout the history of Western Christianity we find so many spiritual successors of Herod and so few of Jesus? The Spanish colonial era, which endured over four centuries from the 1493 colonization of Hispaniola until Spain’s 1898 defeat in the Spanish-American War, alone provides many examples. One of these, King Philip III, was the intended recipient of a 1,200 page chronicle containing 400 pen and ink drawings that illustrate the history of the Andes, the Incas, and Spanish colonization, including detailed descriptions of Andean cultural practices and festivals, Inca sovereigns and government, and the abuses of Christian religious orders which enforced Spanish hegemony. Remarkably, Jesus himself receives a place within the chronology of the Sapa Incas, having been born “when Cinche Roca Inca was eighty years old,” a testament to how rapidly and completely Christianity became embedded within Andean culture early in the colonial era.

The author of this extraordinary document was a Quechua nobleman named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Born around the time of Pizarro’s invasion of what would become the Viceroyalty of Peru, Guaman Poma was from a wealthy family that was related to Inca royalty, though all of his property would be confiscated in 1600 when he was exiled by the government of Huamanga. It was around this time that he began composing El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), the illustrated chronicle addressed to King Philip III upon its completion in 1615. There is no evidence that Philip ever saw this manuscript, and, even more tragically, it remained lost for nearly 300 years until its rediscovery in the Royal Danish Library in 1908.

A Catholic who worked as translator for Spanish priests and friars, Guaman Poma not only describes Jesus’s birth within the chronology of the Sapa Incas (monarchs of the Inca empire), but also presents a stark and terrifying image of God that was enforced by Spanish priests and reinforced by natural disaster. As Guaman Poma wrote:

“In this life, we have seen volcanoes erupt and rain hellfire and sand, laying waste to a city and its region. It could be called nothing other than a miracle when an earthquake killed many people, along with a friar – a Dominican prior. More than a league of the mountain range along the coastline was laid waste and turned into just another league of seawater. Nothing like this has ever happened again, not since the time that God ordered this to happen.”

This is not legend. What Guaman Poma describes here as punishment from God is the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina, the largest in South American history, even larger than the eruption of Krakatoa, burying villages under 7 feet of volcanic rock and killing over a thousand, triggering a volcanic winter that caused famine as far as Russia and China. Spanish church authorities leveraged this terrifying event as divine punishment, subsequently leading processions, requiem masses, exorcisms, and sacrifices of relics (thrown into the crater of El Misti, another nearby volcano).

Ade Bethune was an artist who embodied the example of Jesus and Guaman Poma. She created the masthead for The Catholic Worker and contributed much of its artwork over her lifetime. Dorothy Day wrote about her memorably in The Long Loneliness:

“For the first six months that we published The Catholic Worker, we longed for an artist who could illustrate Peter [Maurin]’s ideas. An answer to our prayers came in the form of a young girl just out of high school who signed her work A. de Bethune… She was Belgian and it was only some years later that we knew her title, Baronne de Bethune. The aristocrat and the peasant Peter got on famously…

When Ade built up her studio in Newport where the family moved soon after we met them, she took in apprentices, young girls from different parts of the country who could not have afforded to pay tuition or to support themselves. My own daughter went to her when she was sixteen and stayed a year, learning the household arts…

I like to speak of her nobility because in her case that is actually what the word connotes. We emphasize the ‘Prince’ when referring to Kropotkin precisely because he gave up titles and estates to be with the poor.”