"According to these theories, the apostle St Thomas (associated in Mexico with the Indian deity Quetzalcoatl and in Peru with Viracocha, among other legendary pre-Inca culture-bearer deities) had appeared among the Indians not long after Christ’s crucifixion, and initiated the New World’s first age of Christianity. . . . Considerably embellishing sixteenth-century hypotheses, certain clergymen and even devout laymen of the independence-era postulated the splendors of a flourishing native American Christian culture that had been snuffed out at the time of conquest by an Iberian variant of Christianity vitiated by greed, individualism and materialism."