The Mother of Jesus is shown to have been pure and to have "kept her maidenhood"[90]; it was the Jews who spoke against Mary "a grievous calumny."[91] Jesus Himself is described as "strengthened with the Holy Spirit," and the Jews are reproached for rejecting "the Apostle of God,"[92] to whom was given "the Evangel with its guidance and light confirmatory of the preceding Law."[93] Thus during the centuries that saw the birth of Christianity, although other non-Christian forces arrayed themselves against the new faith, it was left to the Jews to inaugurate a campaign of vilification against the person of its Founder, whom Moslems to this day revere as one of the great teachers of the world.[94] The Essenes A subtler device for discrediting Christianity and undermining belief in the divine character of our Lord has been adopted by modern writers, principally Jewish, who set out to prove that He belonged to the sect of the Essenes, a community of ascetics holding all goods in common, which had existed in Palestine before the birth of Christ. Thus the Jewish historian Graetz declares that Jesus simply appropriated to himself the essential features of Essenism, and that primitive Christianity was "nothing but an offshoot of Essenism."[95] The Christian Jew Dr. Ginsburg partially endorses this view in a small pamphlet[96] containing most of the evidence that has been brought forward on the subject, and himself expresses the opinion that "it will hardly be doubted that our Saviour Himself belonged to this holy brotherhood."[97] So after representing Christ as a magician in the Toledot Yeshu and the Talmud, Jewish tradition seeks to explain His miraculous works as those of a mere healer--an idea that we shall find descending right through the secret societies to this day. Of course if this were true, if the miracles of Christ were simply due to a knowledge of natural laws and His doctrines were the outcome of a sect, the whole theory of His divine power and mission falls to the ground. This is why it is essential to expose the fallacies and even the bad faith on which the attempt to identify Him with the Essenes is based.