“... To come to the relation between 1 Corinthians 2:9 and Gospel of Thomas 17, there is already consensus that there is a relationship of some kind: the question is of what kind. Already in 1889, obviously well before the discovery of the Coptic text in which Gospel of Thomas 17 first appears, Alfred Resch had proposed that 1 Corinthians 2:9 had good claim to be a dominical saying. The arrival of Gospel of Thomas 17 then prompted Helmut Koester to conclude that it ‘belongs to the tradition of wisdom sayings of Jesus’, indeed, to ‘a version of Q’ which is ‘very primitive’. Patterson, without commenting on the authenticity of the saying, remarks that ‘Paul quotes a saying from the Gospel of Thomas’. However, in 1900 Henry St John Thackeray had already observed that Pseudo-Philo preserves something very like 1 Corinthians 2:9, and this fact complicates the situation considerably. Both seem to contain the same combination of phrases from Isaiah 64 and 65. As a result, Pseudo-Philo’s reference and Paul’s quotation taken together strongly suggest that the Isaianic phrases in question had already been assembled as a pre-Christian scriptural formula, as Thackeray recognised. Pre-Christian Judaism, then, rather than Jesus, should probably be seen as the ultimate source of the formula. ...”