The last 200 years have seen considerable swings in the literary assessment of the earliest Christian literature, including as it does the texts, which became the canonized Scriptures of the Church. The tracing of a historical sequence reflecting historical development required the abandonment of canonicity as a criterion in assessing the literature. Against that background, there emerged the notion of distinguishing between the primitive literature of the Christian movement and that produced after the adoption of the forms of Greco-Roman literary culture. The transmission of the texts from antiquity had been in the hands of the Church. Anti-heretical literature was preserved, but not the texts of those condemned. The very earliest Christian texts are the letters of Paul, a Jew and Pharisee, formerly known as Saul. In biblical studies, canon criticism has reopened the question whether the formation of a canon and the effective turning of many books into one does not change the way the texts are read.