The Ambiguity of Gender: Representations of Wicked Women as Group Identity Markers from the Book of Proverbs to the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies

The article aims at shedding new light on one of the key-feature of the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies’ world-view: Eve // female prophecy, as opposed to Adam // True Prophet. By tracing back the sources of such representation to the Wisdom tradition and the book of Proverbs, as well as to ancient assumptions on women innate ambiguity, it makes the attempts to show how an authoritative Biblical model and gendered prejudices came to be ‘performed’ together in a original and innovative way, in order to make sense of and respond to escalating conflicts among early Christian groups.