The use of the historical argument can be reasonably discouraged, for a wide variety of reasons. No matter what beliefs you can find expressed throughout history, you cannot guarantee that they were the majority, and even then, the majority do not determine the truth, because truth is not a Democracy. You may well find outliers, and those outliers may have a point. Thus, it is fallacious to say "the early Church believed".
But it's easy to see why the historical argument has weight. If it's true that the early Church believed a specific thing, and another thing is a brand new view that either did not exist, or was widely rejected, then it's more than likely false.
Ultimately, the historical argument is generally favored where the Biblical argument is weak. There is no room for reasonable doubt that the Bible teaches the Trinity, so anti-Trinitarians try to blame the Council of Nicaeae. The Roman Catholic Church is a blatantly heretical denomination, so they pretend everyone was Catholic until Luther showed up. Ironically, even Theistic Evolutionists, whose views find no historical precedent what so ever, will claim that Creationism was invented by the 7th Day Adventists, whereas Augustine suggested we should follow science in order to avoid putting people off Christianity.
But the historical argument naturally gains some strength when the Bible itself presents it. See, as much as we don't know about the historical climate of the first century, God knows literally everything about every century. Thus, if His word declares "it was supposed", that means there were a significant number of people who believed whatever follows.
When it comes to Jesus' genealogy, that "supposing" is that Jesus was the Son of Joseph, and not only of Mary. But what follows is Joseph's actual genealogy, beginning with his father, Heli, and ending, amazingly, with God. But why does it end with God? Simply because, by Jewish reckoning, God was the Father of Adam.
Now of course, Jesus was not the Son of Joseph. At least, not in the biological sense. Having been born of a virgin, Jesus had no Earthly father. Joseph was merely His step father, a significant enough role to be considered His father, but not enough to be His father. Thus, Luke specifies that it was supposed that He was the Son of Joseph. But this is the only error of thought here. They thought He was Joseph's Son because they didn't believe Mary conceived in her virginity. Imagine if they did. Paul tells us that if they had any clue who Jesus was, they wouldn't have crucified Him (1 Corinthians 2:8).
But why do they have such a complex genealogy for Joseph? Simply because genealogies were important to Jews. They would literally argue over these things. They would boast about being children of Abraham, for example, brandishing their physical descent from him as some sort of seal of approval from God. But Luke takes Jesus' genealogy all the way back to Adam, the son of God.
In historical Judaism, and indeed in historical Christianity, there is no concept of Evolution. That doesn't mean there was no concept of it in the ancient world. Man pagans had beliefs about how human beings originally resembled fish, and gradually articulated words, and that human cultures could be traced back hundreds of thousands of years. But to the Jews, and even to the early Church, even 10,000 years was an intolerable conclusion. As we see from Luke, they took Genesis seriously enough to take Adam as literally as Joseph, Seth as literally as Heli, Noah as literally as Matthat, and so on and so forth. Even Methuselah, whom Evolutionists assure us lived far too long to have been a historical figure devoid of allegory, appears in Jesus' genealogy. In Jesus' day, the Jews believed the book of Genesis.
And so the question becomes "were they right?" Of course, I will contend the answer is a solid and undeniable yes. It seems strange for 21st century Christians to believe we know better than 1400 years of Jews, and a further 1400 years of both Jews and Christians. We've always held to a historical interpretation of Genesis. Thus, what sense does it make to suddenly say "well actually, they were wrong this whole time, the atheists said so"? I think it is far more logical to assume they knew how to interpret their own book, as much as God knew how to give them a book they could reasonably interpret.