During the birth of Christianity, some of the Jewish apocrypha that dealt with
the coming of the Messianic kingdom became popular in the rising Jewish-Christian
communities. Occasionally these writings were changed or added to, but on the
whole it was found sufficient to reinterpret them as conforming to a Christian
viewpoint. Many texts believed lost for centuries were unearthed in the 19th
and 20th centuries, producing lively speculation about their importance in
early Christianity among religious scholars, while many others survive only
in the form of quotations from them in other writings; for some, no more
than the title is known.