When reports of Jesus and his followers performing miracles started circulating in first century AD, you’d expect critics to assert forcefully that they were made up.

Jesus, after all, was doing all manner of extraordinary things: turning water into wine, healing disabled people, curing leprosy, and even raising Lazarus from the dead.

But early critics of Christianity didn’t go into battle over the facts. When the gospel writers – including Luke, a doctor – put out their accounts of Jesus ministry as the movement following Jesus grew, you might expect the rebuttals to the miracle stories to be robust.

And yet, Christianity’s critics avoided that line of argument.

Celsus, the second century Roman philosopher and critic of Christianity, accepted that Jesus performed miracles. He, like rabbis of the time, thought those miracles had taken place but objected to them, believing that they were sorcery rather than from God.

Craig S. Keener, the new testament scholar who has written books about miracle claims, says: “None of the ancient sources respond to claims of Jesus’s miracles by trying to deny them.”

When Jesus came across a man with a shrivelled hand on the sabbath, he healed it right in front of a group of Pharisees who opposed him and it angered them. If he were faking it, the Pharisees would surely have spread that he was a con man. But they saw it was true.

Even the noted first century Jewish historian Josephus seems to claim that Jesus was a miracle worker. He calls Jesus a wise man who also “worked startling deeds”, a designation that Josephus also applies to miracles associated with the prophet Elisha.

This view was widespread among Jews who did not follow Jesus. The Talmud, the Jewish text compiling rabbinic knowledge, quotes a herald claiming that Jesus would be put to death because “he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy”.

At the time of Jesus on earth, the powerful – such as the Sadducees, who were the upper crust, the high priests, the aristocratic families – seemed pretty opposed to Jesus, this man who was displacing them as the great high priest. They would have every incentive to rubbish the miracle claims.

But when you feed thousands of people with five loaves of bread and two fish, there are lots of witnesses.

Pictured: Duccio di Buoninsegna’s painting of The Raising of Lazarus