The Description of Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla

In the Acts of Paul and Thecla (3, p. 237, 6-9 Lipsius) there is a description of Paul that seems to have no parallel in early Christian literature. Literally translated, it runs thus: "a man small in size, with a bald head and crooked legs; in good health; with eyebrows that met and a rather prominent nose; full of grace, for sometimes he looked like a man and sometimes he had the face of an angel." The words from 'full" to "angel" need not concern us. They are borrowed from the book of Acts, where they describe the martyr Stephen (Acts 6:8, 15). As for the rest, scholars used to suppose that vestiges of oral tradition persisted and gave reliable pictures, at least in part, of what Paul really looked like. W. Michaelis, cited in Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, offers a variant: "the typical portrait of a Jew, admittedly adapted to the eminence of the Apostle."' We shall show that it has nothing to do with either the apostle or a Jew, much with poetical and rhetorical ideas of the way leaders ought to look. First we should indicate, following B. Pick, how the description managed to live on or, at any rate, to be received in later Times. Malalas used it in the sixth century, the author of the Philopatris ascribed to Lucian, in the tenth, and the historian Nicephorus Callistus, in the fourteenth.2 It is thus not possible to say that "the AP through their reception by the Manichees fell completely into disrepute in the Church."3 As for the description itself, we should expect, following the guidance of Elizabeth Evans, to find it based on physiognomic considerations.4 This foundation, it appears, does not lie in a physiognomic manual of the kind edited by R. Foerster in his Scriptores physiognomonici (Leipzig 1893), even in the "Sylloge locorum physiognomonicorum" in the second volume. Instead, it lies in a fairly popular passage from the poet Archilochus (frag. 58 Bergk4), quoted by several second-century writers and paraphrased in the third from one in the second.'