I wouldn't be so sure that there are no hints of a rapture in the early church fathers. Your 'no where to be found in Christian history' is absolutistic. Have you read every word of the church fathers and early Christian documents?
Here are a couple of examples.
Irenaeus of Lyon in
Against Heresies (written about AD 185) wrote:
Those nations however, who did not of themselves raise up their eyes unto heaven, nor returned thanks to their Maker, nor wished to behold the light of truth, but who were like blind mice concealed in the depths of ignorance, the word justly reckons "as waste water from a sink, and as the turning-weight of a balance-in fact, as nothing; " so far useful and serviceable to the just, as stubble conduces towards the growth of the wheat, and its straw, by means of combustion, serves for working gold. And therefore, when
in the end the Church shall be suddenly caught up from this, it is said, "There shall be tribulation such as has not been since the beginning, neither shall be." For this is the last contest of the righteous, in which, when they overcome they are crowned with incorruption (
5.29.1, emphasis added).
Cyprian (AD 200-258) of Carthage in one of his Treatises wrote in describing the last times of tribulation:
He predicted and said that wars, and famines, and earthquakes, and pestilences would arise in each place; and lest an unexpected and new dread of mischiefs should shake us, He previously warned us that adversity would increase more and more in the last times....
And this, as it ought always to be done by God's servants, much more ought to be done now -- now that the world is collapsing and is oppressed with the tempests of mischievous ills; in order that we who see that terrible things have begun, and know that still more terrible things are imminent,
may regard it as the greatest advantage to depart from it as quickly as possible. If in your dwelling the walls were shaking with age, the roofs above you were trembling, and the house, now worn out and wearied, were threatening an immediate destruction to its structure crumbling with age, would you not with all speed depart? If, when you were on a voyage, an angry and raging tempest, by the waves violently aroused, foretold the coming shipwreck, would you not quickly seek the harbour? Lo, the world is changing and passing away, and witnesses to its ruin not now by its age, but by the end of things. And do you not give God thanks, do you not congratulate yourself, that
by an earlier departure you are taken away, and delivered from the shipwrecks and disasters that are imminent? (
Treatise 7.2, 25, on the mortality)
My reading of the church fathers (and I have not read every word from all of them) is that there is a fair sprinkling of post-tribulationism among them.
Oz