Robert F. Smith:
Arthur Miller & Nancy Farriss state that, despite the European view of seeming incompatibility between Christian and pagan Maya concepts, “from a Maya point of view, . . such a combination may represent a perfectly coherent system,” i.e., “developing their own cult along lines already established” (in Hammond & Willey, Maya Archaeology & Ethnohistory, 239).
Miller and Farriss further state "that Christ could have been identified in the indigenous mind with Quetzalcoatl or the Maya equivalent, Kukulcan” (“Religious Syncretism in Colonial Yucatan: The Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Evidence from Tancah, Quintana Roo,” in Hammond & Willey, Maya Archaeology & Ethnohistory, 239).
LDS President John Taylor said that "The story of the life of the Mexican divinity, Quetzalcoatl, closely resembles that of the Savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being." (Taylor, An Examination into and an Elucidation of the Great Principle of the Mediation and Atonement of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ [Salt Lake City: Deseret News Co., 1882], 201).
Indeed, there was a very ancient resurrection cult built around the original Quetzalcoatl, as L. Sejourne has emphasized (Sejourne in Revista Mexicana de Estudios Antropologicos, 16 (1960), 77-90 (Sejourne, Burning Water: Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico [Berkeley: Shamballa, 1976]. See also David Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition [Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982]; Burr Cartwright, The Phoenix of the Western World: Quetzalcoatl and the Sky Religion [Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1982]).
Slaughter of an innocent animal (or human) and the sharing of its flesh are central to Judeo-Christian and Mesoamerican tradition (Nancy M. Farriss, “Sacrifice and Communion in Colonial Maya Religion,” Abstracts of Papers of the 44th International Congress of Americanists, Manchester, England, 1982 (Manchester Univ., School of Geography, 1982), 15; Miller & Farriss in Hammond & Willey, Maya Archaeology & Ethnohistory, 239, on resurrection).
Michael Graulich found compelling evidence of Paradise Lost & Regained, along with Death, Rebirth, and Reward or Punishment in Mesoamerican tradition (Graulich, “Afterlife in Ancient Mexican Thought,” in Bruno Illius and Matthias Laubscher, eds., Circumpacifica: I, Mittel- und Südamerika: Festschrift für Thomas S. Barthel [Frankfort: Peter Lang, 1990], 165-188).
See especially
Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, eds., Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, Second Cambridge Symposium on Recent Research in Mesoamerican Archaeology, August 29-31, 1976 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979), xvi, citing J. E. S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1970).
David H. Kelley, Christian Influences in the Ancient Maya Religion (Calgary: Univ. of Canada, 2004).
Nice sources, but how does this demonstrate Nephites among the Maya? Or that Nephites were in Mesoamerica? Truly, without being sarcastic, this is so overly generalized as to be quite useless for evidence. So far as i am aware, only Mormon scholars try to put Nephites among the Maya......there has not been serious and validated scholarship showing that the Maya were Christian or Christianized.