I believe it is. The Church determined what Christians would read for Scripture according to God's Will as determined by The Church. "All of the Old and New Testaments are merely incidental to the traditions of the Church that followed?"
Not incidental at all; quite important, but still part of Holy Tradition, not apart from and opposed to it.
And yet all the writers of the NT continually referred to Scripture as the standard by which they operated. They did not reference *tradition* or *the church* when it came to matters of doctrine.
The Bereans were of more noble character because they searched the Scriptures to see if what Paul was saying was true.
If church tradition or hierarchy were the criteria, they would have taken Paul at his word, or checked with Peter or some other apostle. They didn't but rather were commended for searching SCRIPTURE.
There is inherent danger in making Scripture subservient to the *church* or *tradition* no matter how holy someone claims it to be. The written word was written down and because we can go back to those manuscripts, has remained unchanged for thousands of years, unlike tradition.
Relying on tradition and apostolic succession to determine truth is a recipe for disaster. There's no failsafe to keep it pure and all the nonsense about God maintaining that integrity through the church is just that. Nonsense.
Church history and the immorality and corruption so frequently associated with the papacy, gives no one any reason to presume that they are in a decent enough spiritual state to be considered a reliable conduit for God to speak through.
Nor is the present state of the church any evidence of God maintaining it for all these centuries, therefore the Church must be of God. Really? With the secrecy regarding their finances, and the abominable job the Roman Catholic church has done in dealing with its pedophile priests, I find it almost impossible to believe the claim that that organization is indeed the bride of Christ and that He is responsible for its continued existence. There are plenty of other good explanations for why it's still here and they don't invoke God.
Hinduism, Buddhism, islam, animaism, etc, have all been around for centuries as well. By the erroneous appeal to age as the criteria as evidence that its continued existence is the result of God's hand in it, then one could just as easily conclude that God kept those other false religions in existence and maintained them for so long because they are right, too.
Take a look at this.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/tca_solascriptura.aspx
Maybe it will explain where the Orthodox are coming from. I have heard the same sort of argument from the father of my oldest goddaughter. He is a convert from Protestantism, an Orthodox priest and an army chaplain in Afghanistan. Try to remember that your forebears didn’t rebel from us nor, until American evangelicals (why is this not a surprise?) decided we all needed saving in the past 40 years or so, did your religious forebears try to make any trouble for us.