We may therefore take it that the majority of Jews in Palestine during the Roman period kept more or less to their biblical laws, prayed to their ancestral deity, and regulated their lives so as to emphasize the regular feasts and fasts of the calendar. They were not likely to have been deeply reflective theologians (even Josephus, who had studied a good deal, was clearly not that), but their symbolic world and their regular praxis give us a first-rate insight into the theology to which, however inarticulately, they gave allegiance.
