Word: sects
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Saul the Pharisee, now Paul the Apostle, joined Barnabas to preach and proselytize in Antioch for a small sect of Jews who called themselves Nazarenes. When he died some 15 years later, he left behind him the firm foundations of a world religion. He shaped Christianity with his thought; Augustine and the church fathers built upon his theology, and Martin Luther found in Paul's writings the key to the Reformation: justification by faith. He stamped Christianity deeply with his missionary zeal; no other religion has penetrated into the corners of the world so persistently, and so careless...
Neither Jew nor Greek. Superficially, the first Christians seemed to be a sect of Judaism. Under the leadership of James, the brother of Jesus, the community in Jerusalem waited quietly for the end of the world, worshiping and sacrificing in the Temple, observing the fast and feast days and the stringencies of the Torah. Most of their converts were Jews; as for the Gentiles, it was understood that no man could be a Christian without first being a Jew-which meant circumcision and obedience to the dietary laws...
Then Abdul Rahman turned to face the day with gladness, for it was Qam Arya, a lucky month for the people of his sect, the Mandaeans. It was also the beginning of summer, for the Mandaeans have never corrected their twelve-month calendar through the centuries, and their seasons have lost track...
Underground for Survival. The Mandaeans, markedly taller and fairer than the swarthy Arabs of Iraq, sometimes identify themselves in their broken English as "John Baptist Christians." But the suggestion that they are some kind of primitive Christian sect with a special reverence for John the Baptist is false-and deliberately so. The Mandaeans are neither Moslems, nor Jews, nor Christians...
...Gaulle now seemed to be moving toward dividing Algeria into new political units organized around the country's chief ethnic and religious groups: the Arabs, Berbers, Europeans, Jews and Mozabites (an austere Moslem desert sect). Instead of countrywide self-determination, in which the Arabs would clearly prevail, De Gaulle would be seeking some form of federation of semiautonomous communities-a kind of Gallic version of Britain's 1921 partition of Ireland...