More Evidence For The Historicity Of Matthew 2:16

I wrote about some evidence for the passage's historicity in a thread several years ago (including in the comments section). In a post last year, I discussed a recent book by Sabine Huebner that addresses some issues related to the infancy narratives, including Matthew 2:16. People in the ancient world had a lot of reasons to discern, remember, and keep records of how long it took to travel from one location to another (e.g., people operating businesses whose success depended on issues of timing). One of the chapters in Huebner's book is about travel in the ancient world. Though she isn't focused on Matthew 2:16, she provides some examples of how issues of how long a journey takes would come up in a variety of contexts, such as letters sent between relatives arranging a meeting with one another (e.g., approximate Kindle locations 2838 and 3163 in Papyri And The Social World Of The New Testament [New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019]). Knowledge about how long journeys should take was somewhat common in the ancient world, including among people of lower social status. In fact, Huebner's chapter is focused on the lower classes. So, it seems that the fact that the magi's journey should have taken much less than two years was easily accessible to Matthew and his original audience. For a discussion of the significance of that situation, see the first thread linked above.