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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 clash with the way Paul’s critics described him: “His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive” (2 Cor. 10:10).

2. Was He Married?

Probably not. But because Paul said almost nothing about this, there’s plenty of room to debate the matter.

When counseling singles and widows at Corinth, he wrote, “It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am” (1 Cor. 7:8).

But when listing the rights of an apostle and arguing on behalf of himself and Barnabas, he said, “Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?” (1 Cor. 9:5).

In interpreting this statement, some scholars say Paul’s question, taken with his statement that he was unmarried, suggests he was a widower who had at least occasionally traveled with his wife. Others see Paul using this question to emphasize that he and Barnabas, as single men, were not burdening the church with the added, though legitimate, expenses of caring for their wives.

3. What Was His “Thorn in the Flesh”

We can only guess, but Paul gives two clues. He believed the purpose of the thorn was (1) “to keep me from becoming conceited” and (2) “to torment me” (2 Cor. 12:7). Whatever the thorn was, it humbled him persistently.

Scholars have diagnosed a full chart of physical diseases, psychological problems, and spiritual struggles—hysteria, migraines, epilepsy, and obnoxious Christians, to name a few.

A view from the Middle Ages said Paul couldn’t get sex off his mind. But that doesn’t fit with his words in 1 Corinthians: “I wish that all men were as I am.… But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (7:7, 9).

Some scholars today suggest Paul’s thorn was his audience, the troublesome Corinthian church itself. In a word study of Paul’s statement, scholars point out that every time the New Testament uses angel/messenger, torment, and take it away, the words refer to people. Thorn doesn’t show up anywhere else in the New Testament, but a version of it appears in the Greek translation of Numbers 33:55 and describes what the Canaanites are to the Jews: “thorns in your sides.”

Most scholars today take literally Paul’s reference to the “flesh.” They see the thorn as a physical problem.

Some of them point out that Paul used the same Greek word when writing about the unspecified illness that kept him in Galatia. They speculate that in both cases Paul was talking about an eye disease—bad enough, perhaps, to make him today legally blind. For after mentioning the illness, Paul added, “If you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me” (Gal. 4:15). And at the end of the letter, Paul took the work from his scribe and added a personal postscript: “See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand” (Gal. 6:11).

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