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Why is the earliest (= apostolic) witness normative?

I should suppose the answer to this question is not simply because it is closest to Jesus, and hence closest to the locus of revelation, because there is always the possibility that those who are closest to an event understand it, or its significance, less adequately than some who stand further away from it. What but some supernatural overriding of natural conditions could rule out this possibility? Precluding such supernatural intervention, however, one must allow for this possibility, and hence concede that the earliest witness can at best be contingently normative.

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The only way to avoid the difficulty, then, is to define the source of authority and the authority it authorizes correlatively, in relation to one another – -- as follows: If Christians are all those who belong to the community constituted by and/or conformed to the earliest Christian witness, this witness is eo ipso uniquely normative for Christians. It is so, however, de iure as well as de facto, because, or insofar as, it is authorized by the Jesus Christ to whom it bears witness. Conversely, the Jesus Christ who authorizes the earliest Christian witness de iure is none other than the one to whom it bears more or less adequate witness.

Thus the reason the earliest Christian witness is uniquely normative, so far as its normativeness is understood to be de iure as well as de facto, is the Jesus Christ to whom it bears witness. This Jesus Christ is the explicit primal source of all properly Christian authority; and the unique normativeness of the earliest (= apostolic) witness is that it is the original and originating witness to this Jesus Christ.

n.d.