Andrew, that’s a very clear statement. 

I think most folks here would generally agree with a methodology that tries not to start with a set of formulaic "ready made" solutions, but to rather dig into the narrative with an attempt at openness to the original historical context.

In this endeavor, I think your own exigesis of the NT is refreshingly different. Yet, we have failed to go far enough and hence the feeling that "there is far more to being God’s people than is really manifested either in the life of the disciples around Jesus or in the early churches". 

We have tended to look at Paul (or more generally anything in any of the epistles) as one who always has an apt theological formula for whatever problems we are facing in our attempts today to live as God’s children. Paul certainly did take up the task of constructing a people for God, a realised new creation, in his own time.

But, I think this idea of seeking a "model" whether within or after the NT, is part of the problem.

The narrative within which Paul plays such a key role is not in itself "the answer". Rather, we could look at the first crop of disciples (including Paul) as those who have imbibed much of Jesus, in turn are now faced with needing to recontextualise "the gospel" and "the way" for strangely different cultural contexts. The original narrative (that of Jesus himself) then becomes of primary importance and it’s my feeling that the NT church as a whole recognised their need to both anchor themselves and to simultaneously reinterpret the gospel for their own varying situations. Hence I think we have a good reason for just this combination of books in the NT period - gospels, and epistles - the anchors and the interpretations.

If we recognise the narrative for what it is, our hermeneutical questions can focus more on how the gospel came to be applied in the specific epistolic ways, and we would also be less inclined to elevate these individual applications (as found in the epistles-yes even Romans) into something like an end in itself.

And in saying this I do agree with part of the quote above!

It’s my feeling that because of our fascination with the permutations of the epistles, we never really have realised the importance of the gospel traditions themselves in shaping the young believers’ attempts to contextualise. A hermeneutic that tries now to go from the gospel traditions to what a people founded on this tradition should look like now is exactly what is missing for me.

A primary problem with your broader proposal is that it tosses us into an even later period, with greater distance from key historical events and still fails in the attempt to find something that would resemble a "people of God" on which we could safely model ourselves.

Live to serve : Serve to live