NOT BIRDS OF A FEATHER: UNRAVELING THE MYTH OF THE FEATHERED SERPENT AS A MEMORY OF JESUS CHRIST President John Taylor stated 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.” He has been followed by numerous writers attempting to demonstrate that thesis. The Quetzalcoatl mythology is very complex and has undergone multiple transformations in the hands of those who have heard it and repeated it, a process that began with the early Spanish recorders of the myth and has its most recent elaboration in the Quetzalcoatl/Christ stories. This paper examines the documentary, iconographic, and archaeological evidence for the native Quetzalcoatl mythology and analyzes it against the possibility that it might have some connection to the Book of Mormon

BRANT GARDNER