I've heard this discussion a lot from my scholarly friends at church, who have gone to school for history or philosophy or seminary. They all say that there are lots of texts that can be cross referenced with many books of the New Testament.
I want to know about these books/writings and how they're viewed in the historical community. Are they reliable? Do historians generally agree with the events of the New Testament? Is there a consensus that Jesus did exist and people followed him around (not necessarily that he was the Son of God or performed miracles, but that some of these events definitively happened)?
Also, feel free to apply to the same question to the Old Testament, since my original question asked about The Bible as a whole.
Much of the Bible is historically accurate. The towns mentioned and the historical figures appear in many other sources. Pontius Pilate absolutely existed. So did Herod.
You start to run into problems when you try to verify the events of the New Testament. Some major plot points are probably historical (the census, for example) but the crucifixion? The sermon on the mount? Christ himself? Problematic.
There are two (two!) contemporaneous(ish) references to Jesus in the historical record outside of the Bible or other Christian writing.
Both men were were born after Jesus was dead and neither were particularly interested in Christians. What they wrote about the subject was second-hand and both references are very brief. Tacitus just says Christians were named after some guy named Christ and Josephus might have been talking about some other Jesus.
The best you can say is Tacitus and Josephus confirm that early Christians believed Christ existed.
Either way though, his absence isn't unexpected. In its early days, the Christian church was one obscure cult among many and obscure cults do not leave much of a mark on the historical record. By the time anyone started paying any attention, Christ was well dead.
TL;DR: The events laid out in the Bible are largely uncorroborated and therefore suspect from a historical perspective.