Physical description of apostle paul

1. What Did Paul Look Like?

He was a bald-headed, bowlegged short man with a big nose, and an unbroken eyebrow that lay across his forehead like a dead caterpillar.

That’s a paraphrase.

It’s from the only physical description of Paul, in an early Christian document, the Acts of Paul.

(Its author, a second-century church leader, was fired over the book because he attributed to Paul some unorthodox teachings such as sexual abstinence in marriage.)

A more literal translation of the description of Paul in Greek reads, “A man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were far apart; he had large eyes, and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long.”

This may be little more than imaginative writing from a century after Paul died, but it does not cl