I understand your confusion if you were not following the whole conversation regarding second and third hand accounts.
No need to go over it all again.
****But, unless they can be verified by Holy Scripture and as long as they do not contradict Scripture, they are part of the history of our faith. But, outside of Holy Scripture, there is no other authority we have above them and that is why God gave them to us.****
So, what we have here is the two legged stool. The Scriptures attest to the early church fathers, and the early church fathers attest to Scripture?
Here is why that two legged stool cannot stand on its own.
We are often given this favorite verse from protestants which they profess supports the Scripture alone faith. “they searched the scriptures daily to see if what paul said is true.”
They searched the OT to see if what Paul said was true.
Can we agree on that?
If they searched the scripture, can we agree that the Bereans were Jews, because the Gentiles would not have the OT Scriptures would they?
Scriptures tells us they received the word, but verified what they were hearing?
What were they verifying? What was important for the Bereans to accept as true?
That Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah which the OT prophesied and that He had delivered them from the slavery and wages of sin.
But, this Jesus was not what they were expecting, according to their Scriptures and that is why He was rejected by His own people. Therefore, first and foremost, they would have accept that Jesus was/is who the Apostles said He was.
Why? Because if Jesus is not God, with the authority to forgive sin and pour grace out upon people, then the Apostles were exactly what Gamaliel said, just like the others who had come before and made such claims and their movement would have fallen apart, just as the others had.
The authority of Jesus, as the Son of God, as God was what the Bereans searched for in Scripture, because the message of Jesus, and Jesus Himself, were radically different than what the Jewish people were waiting to hear.
Jesus told the pharisees and Saducees and Scribes that they searched Scripture thinking they would find eternal life, but did not recognize that life giver when He stood before them. He said they didn’t know Scripture or Him.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have knowledge of Scripture, it is that they were too tied to their rigid understanding of it and to the face value of the words and not the deeper meaning.
Scripture confirmed Jesus, but only when seen in light of the testimony of the Apostles and so we have two legs of the stool. The third is the Holy Spirit, who guides us to all truth.
This is why the Church is important and necessary.
The early fathers attest to Scripture, which in turn confirms them, but then the Holy Spirit is needed as guide to which Scripture and what theology of the early fathers, for we know that there were many “scriptures” not included in the final Canon of Scripture, and there were many writing of early Christians not accepted as truth.
Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, Magisterium the three legs of Christ’s Church.
Whether you choose to admit it or not.
I do not admit nor accept the false premise. This "three-legged stool" is a Roman Catholic Church construct that seeks to assert equal authority to tradition and the magesterium as to that of Holy Scripture. They cannot be equal because of the simple truth that only Holy Scripture is the infallible, inerrant, God-breathed and revealed truth. If the supposed traditions or dogmas passed down from church "fathers" and the magesterium go against Holy Scripture, then Scripture has priority. God's truth - as revealed in the Bible - is to be upheld and supported by the Church of Christ, his body, by both its behavior and by its preaching.
In Scripture, the person of God and the Word of God are everywhere interrelated, so much so that whatever is true about the character of God is true about the nature of God's Word. God is true, impeccable, and reliable; therefore, so is His Word. What a person thinks about God's Word, in reality, reflects what a person thinks about God.
-John MacArthur
Basil the Great (ca.329–379)
On the Holy Spirit, 7.16
“We are not content simply because this is the tradition of the Fathers. What is important is that the Fathers followed the meaning of the Scripture.”