Driving a Lopsided Lorry

This Advent, I have been doing a wonderful devotional series. It has streaming videos which are available a few per week throughout the season. As I watched and learned a great deal more about the connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament, I found myself suddenly able to articulate something I have felt for a long time.
There is a simple reason the study's author was able to make the connections he did; he went to the documents we have access to from the Early Church. Who better to understand John's Gospel and the Revelation of John than his students? The Apostle John taught Polycarp, Polycarp taught Irenaeus. We have letters written by Irenaeus.
The writers of the New Testament scriptures wrote in the context of the established Church. Jesus was a rabbi. In His time, that meant He taught by word of mouth, and students of rabbis memorized the things their rabbi taught. (This was also the pattern others in the ancient world used to preserve important knowledge) The Apostles memorized what Jesus taught them word for word. As they spread the Gospel, they taught these things to the new Christians. Initially, the Church operated entirely upon the oral teaching (or oral tradition) of the Apostles. The Gospels were written, then, within the context of the established Church. The New Testament was written with the intended audience of Christians who were within the established Church. I say all of this to reinforce my point; the oral tradition Jesus passed down through the Apostles is just as important as the written word.Understanding the context in which the scriptures were written and who they were written for (the intended audience) helps us gain insight into their meaning.
What occurred to me is that trying to interpret scripture outside of the Apostolic Tradition is like trying to drive a lopsided lorry; imagine you have goods you need to transport and the only truck available is missing a wheel- there are only three wheels instead of four. Now, you might get the goods to the intended location, but the trip is going to take longer and be fraught with difficulty. That is the best case scenario. It's just as possible that you won't make it. Without Apostolic Tradition, you are driving the lopsided lorry, but there is an alternative. You can study scripture within the context it was written in by pairing it with Apostolic Tradition. In this way, you are putting a spare where that wheel is missing.
I have been discovering that the Early Church Fathers teach us a great deal more than I had previously realized. For example, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus wrote about the Virgin Mary and drew parallels between the Old Testament and the New Testament scriptures. These connections are important, as they help us understand what the author intended.