 A Christian Old Palestinian dialect may have arisen from the pagan one, and this dialect may be behind some of the Western Aramaic tendencies found in the otherwise eastern Old Syriac gospels (see Peshitta).In the 1st century CE, Jews in Roman Judaea primarily spoke Aramaic (besides Koine Greek as the international language of the Roman administration and trade).In addition to the formal, literary dialects of Aramaic based on Hasmonaean and Babylonian there were a number of colloquial Aramaic dialects.