Just looked at the OED. Another definition is "Alluring by false show of beauty or richness; showily attractive. Now often applied to the style of a painter or writer."
I also would disclaim any particular interest in "the purveyor" except as a construct in human minds. I'm anything but a biblical scholar, and what I've read of the historical Jesus scholarship leaves me with the impression of huge effort going into inquiry about sources so obscure that any outcome must be barren.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Gordon Fitch wrote:
> | ...
>
> Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
> > I had in mind the SotM's quick appeal to those who want to see Christianity as an
> > ideology of sympathy, kindness, and love, in particular, of the poor and
> > oppressed. And who like to think of people like Ashcroft as people who just got
> > the sublime message wrong. As I tried to suggest, Christianity expresses a
> > chronic, unresolved ambivalence about domination and submission. Hence the
> > liberative potential of Christian faith, which has had many manifestations,
> > carries its own limitations.
>
> While I'd agree that the SotM has many good hooks -- the
> purveyor was, after all, trying to attract attention -- and
> that the message could be read as containing unresolved
> ambivalences about domination-submission (and a lot of other
> things) I thought the term "meretricious" was odd, since it
> means "pertaining to prostitutes; cheap, vulgar, easy,
> insincere". Besides the word itself being a patriarchal
> slander on the erotic arts and their practitioners, it doesn't
> suggest itself at all to me as appropriate to a text which I
> find by turns poetic, mysterious, and repulsive. I think that
> it is only long, hypnotic familiarity and many thicknesses of
> ideological coating which enable it to be taken as merely a
> philosophy of sympathy and love (or of righteousness or
> conformity or whatever). It is my strong suspicion that
> Ashcroft and company do not actually _read_ the Bible, although
> they may pass their eyes over carefully selected and processed
> parts of it. As Ortega y Gasset remarked, those who go to
> the scriptures will be surprised, and I don't think Ashcroft
> and company want to be surprised.