To build the Church from the Bible alone, without any organic connection with the apostolic community, would be like reconstructing the house I grew up in based only on what is written in my diary. It would be so unlike the original that it would not look even remotely familiar to me.
I would probably notice that the floor plan looks not like the original, but like what I described in my diary. I would instantly know that the reconstruction was a reconstruction based on what I wrote, and not the original, because it would look like a fleshing out of my diary rather than the original that my diary was a reflection of.
For example, let’s say I refer to my room and my sister’s room being upstairs, but for whatever reason I never say which one is on the right and on the left. The reconstruction has a 50-50 chance of getting that detail wrong. Or let’s say that I never mention that the metal number “4” in the middle of our address-shingle above the front door was missing, but nobody bothered to mention it because it was just common knowledge to everyone in our community that got passed down the generations. Or again, let’s say there was a secret compartment behind the original fuse box that we basically knew, in a way, that it was there, even though we never used it for anything, but when we converted to circuit breakers, it became important because the new CB box fit right into it.
You see, these details are like how we do our worship services - the Bible says more or less that we did them on Sundays and we did the Lord’s Supper, but not how often, and hardly any details are given about how exactly we did it, so a reconstruction based on the Bible alone would get a lot of things wrong, or maybe let’s just say “different” or “that’s actually not how we did it”. Or about things we take for granted because they are already in Tradition, like confessing your sins secretly to a priest rather than to each other in public, because that’s not spelled out in the Bible either simply because everybody knew the routine. Or again, stuff like papal infallibility, which we all basically knew about from the beginning but never spelled out until later because it just never really came up or became an issue.
