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What I have failed sufficiently to appreciate, however, is that this apostolic word is the primary authority not only because or insofar as it has an auctoritas normativa but also because or insofar as it has an auctoritas causativa. Indeed, the orthodox notion of the apostolic word as fundamentum fidei organicum seu minsterialeministeriale really has to do with this word more as auctoritas causativa than as auctoritas normativa (although one would never know this from my discussion of the concept in my essay on Marxsen!). The apostolic word is, above all, the authorized word through which faith is born or reborn as from a seed and thus is "the means of generating faith and bringing about blessedness."

This means that I need to reconsider – -- and reformulate – -- my way of putting the difference between the functions of the earliest witness, depending upon the two different questions it may be used to answer. Specifically, I need to reformulate the sixth of my ten theses on the two questions that may be asked historically about Jesus and make the other indicated changes as follows:

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2. This is so because, in either case, one could not even ask the question, much less answer it, apart from particular historical experience of Jesus – -- mediate if not immediate.

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8. This explains why any attempt to answer the second question is and must be peculiarly problematic – -- namely, because, in the absence of any primary empirical-historical source, any control on inferences from the earliest witness to the being of Jesus in himself must itself be reconstructed from inferences that themselves are either uncontrolled, and therefore beg the question, or are really derived from somewhere else.

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