On what basis do Christians accept miracle-stories in the New Testament while rejecting those of other religions?

The question is fair. Christians do accept one set of miracle reports and reject others, and that needs a stated basis rather than a shrug. The basis is not 'ours are ours.' It is the ordinary historical test, applied case by case.

1. Miracles are not ruled out in advance. If God exists and can act in the world, miracles are possible, and Christianity's claim is not that nature is a sealed box. C. S. Lewis argues in Miracles that nature has an author, and an author is not imprisoned by his book. So the Christian position is not 'miracles are impossible' but 'miracles are evidence-bearing events.'

2. The test is evidence, not tribe. Each report gets weighed on the same scales: how early is the source, how close to the event, are there multiple independent witnesses, does the report cut against the teller's interest, does it fit what else we know. That is a method anyone can run on the New Testament, which is the point.

3. The Gospels are early and multiple. Paul passes on a creed he 'received' concerning Christ's death and resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4), which most scholars date within a few years of the events, and the Gospels are written within a generation. These are not legends accreting over centuries around a moral teacher. That dating is the first thing to check, and it is checkable.

4. Rivals fare worse on the same scale. Philostratus wrote his Life of Apollonius of Tyana around A.D. 220, at an empress's request, about a figure of the first century, and it is essentially a single commissioned source. Buddhist birth narratives are centuries later than their subject. That is not contempt for other traditions; it is the same dating question applied evenly.

5. Religions make different kinds of claims. Islam's central sign is the Qur'an itself, a book, so its evidential question is textual rather than historical. Many Hindu miracle claims are tied to a particular shrine and deity within a frankly plural framework. When a religion locates its miracle in a text or a place rather than a datable public event, the comparison changes shape.

6. A miracle needs a transcendent agent. If a miracle is an event beyond natural causes, it requires an agent with power beyond nature. Systems in which the divine is simply identified with the world, or is one god among many with limited jurisdiction, have trouble supplying such an agent. That is an internal pressure on their miracle claims, not an insult to the people who hold them.

7. The objection's rule erases history. If the existence of rival miracle stories discredits miracle stories, then the existence of rival accounts discredits every historical report, and ancient history collapses. And the objection is rarely 'no miracle claim is credible'; it is 'yours is not,' which requires weighing evidence, which is the Christian method. The principle is only ever applied in one direction.

8. The New Testament rejects credulity. Jesus warns that false christs will perform 'great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect' (Matthew 24:24), and John writes, 'do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits' (1 John 4:1). A Christian who believes every healing claim on the internet is not following the New Testament; he is disobeying it.

9. Everything rests on a public event. 'If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain' (1 Corinthians 15:14). Peter says the same to a Jerusalem crowd: Jesus was attested 'with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know' (Acts 2:22). The claim is falsifiable, and Paul treats it as such.

10. Historians genuinely disagree. Hume argued that no testimony can outweigh the uniform experience of nature; the standard reply is that this assumes nature is all there is, which is the conclusion he needs to prove, and that if God exists, uniform experience is not the whole story. Some miracle claims from other traditions may also be genuine; Christians are not committed to a rule forbidding that.

The Christian position is not that miracles are ours and yours are nonsense. It is that miracle claims are historical claims, and historical claims get weighed. The resurrection is offered as the one that will bear the weight.

Sources: C. S. Lewis; Miracles; Nabeel Qureshi; Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus; John Lennox; William Lane Craig; David Hume.

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