“... As far as I am aware, it is also the case that no one has yet argued that Romans 10 is part of the inspiration for Thomas. Or, to put it more precisely: that Paul’s use of Deuteronomy 30 in Romans 10 lies behind Thomas’s use of Deuteronomy 30, such that the reception in Thomas is mediated through the reception in Paul. [...] In the Greek text of GTh 3, Jesus prepares his disciples for a possible confrontation with enemies, who are imagined as enforcing two absurd views of the kingdom – that the kingdom is up in the heavens/sky, or that it is under the earth. A number of scholars have already suggested reference to Deuteronomy 30 here, which is not to discount other influences. The ‘not up in heaven, not in the sea under the earth, but within you’ triad here in Thomas is strikingly similar to the ‘not up in heaven, not across the sea, but very near you’ triad in Deuteronomy 30. The question becomes: does Thomas employ Deuteronomy in a reasonably direct way, or is Deuteronomy 30 mediated to Thomas through a pre-existing interpretative tradition? The contention here is that the Pauline interpretation of Deuteronomy 30 shapes Thomas’s use of the passage. [...] The reason for this is the way Thomas talks of the region ‘under the earth’ where the fish live. Deuteronomy has, and its pre-Pauline interpretations all retain, a contrast between ‘up in heaven’ and ‘across the sea’. Paul and Thomas, however, both incorporate a small change. Both contrast the heaven above with what is below. Paul calls it the ‘abyss’, and presumes that it is the region where the dead reside: it is the place from which you might at least imagine ‘bringing Christ up from the dead’. Thomas calls it the region ‘under the earth’, where the fish are. These are the same place – not across the sea as in Deuteronomy, Baruch and Philo (see the synopsis below), but in the tehom under the earth, where people sleep with the fishes. [...] In conclusion, then, Paul and Thomas alone share this idea of reinterpreting Deuteronomy’s contrast as between heaven and the abyss (see Table 10.4). [...] So which is more likely to have developed this use of Deuteronomy 30 first, Romans or Thomas? The serious shortage of any independent use of the Old Testament in Thomas suggests that Thomas is probably secondary here. ...”