The apostles didn't write the Gospels.  The authors of those did have particular goals and target audiences.  Your praise of scholarship is misguided.  Jesus didn't preach praise of scholarship.  Aquinas is best studied to understand how the misconceptions and biases of the past can poison the thinking of the Church.  
I note that you carefully choose what you wish to preach about, but fail to address a number of questions.  Here they are again so you can explain how your "orthodox" faith fits:
He was teaching that faith was inert and contained in a set of rules? Amazing. Did he provide the complete list of rules? If not, then how could he expect us to follow them? Surely you are not now going to claim the aggregation of rules, rituals, traditions and rites developed by the catholic church over the past 1900 years or so are required for salvation and represent "faith"?