There's no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!

You are right about the narrow fact, and it is worth stating plainly: no surviving pagan or Jewish writer describes Jesus healing anyone or rising from the dead. The question is what that absence is worth, and whether the documents we do have deserve a hearing on their own merits.

1. Concede the specific gap. Because no outsider narrates a miracle, the case cannot rest on external confirmation of the miracles themselves. What outsiders give us is the frame: a real man, executed under Pilate, worshiped as divine within a generation. That corroborates the setting. It does not corroborate the signs, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

2. Your rule would erase ancient history. We accept that Hannibal crossed the Alps and that Spartacus led a slave revolt on sources written decades later by people with axes to grind. If documents written by convinced followers within a generation are disqualified in advance, almost nothing in antiquity survives. The fair test is earliness, eyewitness roots, and whether the authors included material that hurt their own case.

3. It is a library, not one book. Four Gospels, Acts, thirteen letters bearing Paul's name, and others, written across decades in different places. Paul's summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is a formula he says he received, which is technical language for handed-down tradition, and it names witnesses including a group of more than five hundred, most still alive when he wrote. That is an invitation to check, not a story sealed away from examination.

4. Hostile witnesses confirm the frame. Tacitus, who despised Christians, records that Christus suffered execution under Pilate (Annals 15.44). Josephus refers to Jesus who was called Christ, and to the execution of James, the brother of Jesus (Antiquities 20.9.1). Pliny the Younger, investigating Christians for Trajan, reports that they sang to Christ as to a god (Letters 10.96). None of these men believed. All of them place the movement and its founder in history.

5. The embarrassing details are fingerprints. Fabricators polish. These accounts do not. Women are the first witnesses to the empty tomb in a culture that discounted women's testimony. Peter denies Jesus three times. The disciples flee. Jesus dies crying out that he is forsaken. Historians call this the criterion of embarrassment: material that damages the author's own case is unlikely to have been invented.

6. Ruling out miracles is philosophy. Historians can establish what was reported and how early. They cannot establish that the laws of nature were never suspended, because no archive settles a metaphysical claim. If God exists, a resurrection is not a violation of nature but an act of the one who made it. The premise that miracles cannot happen is a philosophical commitment wearing a historian's coat.

7. The resurrection is a checkable claim. Paul stakes everything on it: if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14). That is a falsifiable statement, offered by a man with every reason to hedge. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona argue that a small set of facts is granted by the large majority of critical scholars, including skeptics: the tomb was found empty, appearances occurred to individuals and groups, and frightened disciples became people who would not recant.

8. Every alternative has costs too. Hallucination does not explain an empty tomb or group appearances. Theft does not explain men dying for what they claimed to have seen. Legend does not fit the timeframe, because the core formula predates the Gospels by years rather than centuries. The question is not whether the resurrection requires faith. It is which account requires less.

9. The texts invite the investigation. Luke opens by telling Theophilus he has followed all things closely for some time past, and writes so that you may have certainty (Luke 1:1-4). John says his signs are written so that you may believe (John 20:30-31). A hoax does not usually hand its reader the criteria for testing it.

The real question is not whether a Roman senator narrated a healing. It is whether these documents are the kind of evidence we would weigh seriously in any other ancient case. Early, multiple, self-critical in places, and corroborated at the edges, they are. The miracle claims stand or fall with the resurrection, and that is a claim you can investigate.

Sources: Tacitus, Annals; Josephus, Antiquities; Pliny the Younger, Letters; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses; Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus; Craig A. Evans.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• The New Testament authors were all influenced by pagan religions. Sorry Christians, but Jesus is an unhistorical myth. If you don’t believe me, Google 'Jesus Mithras Osirus Horus'.