THE traditional accounts of the personal appearance of the great Apostle are too late to have any independent value, but it is far from improbable that where they coincide they preserve with accuracy a few particulars. Such as they are, the reader may perhaps care to see them translated; but he must bear in mind the sad probability that there were periods of St. Paul’s career at which, owing to the disfigurement wrought by the ravages of his affliction, we should not have liked to gaze upon his face.
In the sixth century John of Antioch, commonly called Malala,1 writes that “Paul was in person round–shouldered (τῆ ἡλικίᾳ κονδοειδής), with a sprinkling of grey on his head and beard, with an aquiline nose, greyish eyes, meeting eyebrows,2 with a mixture of pale and red in his complexion, and an ample beard. With a genial expression of countenance, he was sensible, earnest, easily accessible, sweet, and inspired with the Holy Spirit.”
Nicephorus,3 writing in the fifteenth century, says, “Paul was short, and dwarfish in stature, and, as it were, crooked in person and slightly bent. His face was pale, his aspect winning. He was bald–headed, and his eyes were bright. His nose was prominent and aquiline, his beard thick and tolerably long, and both this and his head were sprinkled with white hairs.”
In the Acts of Paul and Thekla, a romance of the third century, he is described as “short, bald, bow–legged, with meeting eyebrows, hook–nosed, full of grace.”4
Lastly, in the Philopatris of the pseudo–Lucian,5 a forgery of the fourth century,6 he is contemptuously alluded to as “the bald–headed, hook–nosed Galilæan who trod the air into the third heaven, and learnt the most beautiful things.”
The reader must judge whether any rill of truth may have trickled into these accounts through centuries of tradition. As they do not contradict, but are rather confirmed by, the earliest portraits which have been preserved to us, we may perhaps assume from them thus much, that St. Paul was short—a fact also mentioned by the pseudo– Chrysostom,7 and to which he may himself allude with somewhat bitter touches of irony in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians8—that he had a slight stoop, if not a positive bend, in the shoulders; that his nose was aquiline, and that his thin hair was early “sable–silvered.” We may also conjecture from these notices that his face was pale, and liable to a quick flush and change of expression, and that when he was not absolutely disfigured by his malady, or when he was able to throw off the painful self–consciousness by which it was accompanied, the grace and sweetness of his address, the dignity and fire of his bearing, entirely removed the first unfavourable impression caused by the insignificance of his aspect. We may conclude that this was the case from many of the circumstances of his intercourse with men and churches, and also from the fact that the rude inhabitants of Lystra take him—before he had yet attained to middle age, and before his body had been so rudely battered as it was by many subsequent miseries—for an incarnation of the young and eloquent Hermes.