Summations Only

It's not really fair to describe the Church Fathers as being contemporary with, or 'just behind' the apostles - especially seeing as the Church Fathers mentioned in your previous big long quote were not amongst the earliest. The earliest you mentioned was Justin Martyr, who was born about a century after the Massacre of the Innocents was supposed to take place, and wrote the works we have decades after that. This would be like a forty-year old today discussing an event that happened during the Franco-Prussian war - except for the fact that the amount of documentary and photographic evidence that exists in today's world vastly exceeds anything that would have existed in second century Palestine. It's not a recent as you seem to be implying.What's more, Justin was the earliest you mentioned, the other two (Origen and Irenaeus) were a century further removed from events.However... I think it's a bit of a stretch to describe this as one of the 'most major acts' in his career. If the massacre of the innocents is a historical event, then we're not talking about exterminating all the males babies in the modern city of Bethlehem, we're talking about the male babies in the first century village of Bethlehem. We're talking about 10 babies, not hundreds. It's perfectly possible that Josephus considered the executions of his wife, his mother-in-law, his brother-in-law and several of his own children to be greater atrocities that the deaths of a few nameless babies in a small village.

So, am I to understand that the arugment is that, because people such as Polycarp and Clement, whose lives may have overlapped with the author of Matthew, had read Matthew, and didn't accuse him of being a liar, this lends support to the veracity of Matthew?This seems like a strange argument to make. Regarding the specific case of the Massacre of the Innocents, remember that you were also claiming it wouldn't have been that significant an event at the time. These church fathers obviously accepted Matthew's word about things, that's why they became leaders of the church, but how would they have verified this insignificant event that Matthew claimed happened decades before? Polycarp's birth is generally dated about 35 years after Jesus' death, so what significance does it have for him not to doubt Matthew's word. It would be like me joining a new religion, and not doubting the word of the teachers about some fairly insignificant event that happened during the Frist World War. Even with Ignatius we're talking about an event that is supposed to have happened during the Chinese Civil War. And these aren't people with internet, or TV, or exhaustive libraries.You can't simultaneously dismiss the silence of people like Josephus by arguing that the event wouldn't have been considered widely significant; and then cite as support the fact that early Christians don't question the story decades or centuries later. Why should they?