Woman Preaches Dispensationalist Sermonette At Annual Southern Baptist Convention

The 2024 Annual Southern Baptist Convention is underway, and despite the heated debate over female pastors being had at the convention, Bart Barber let a woman preach at the convention in a flagrant disregard for Baptist polity and tradition. The preaching came in the guise of prayer, but what followed was a cultish sermonette that would have made John Hagee proud.

Some might say that having a woman lead prayer was a red flag, but regardless, when a woman walked up to the microphone with a giant Star of David necklace, what followed was what one would expect. It’s worth noting that the so-called Star of David is an occultic symbol with zero favorable references in Scripture.

Rather than head bowed eyes closed, the woman looked throughout the room as she explained that Jews are God’s chosen people and prayed over the pagan nation of Modern Israel, stylistically delivered like a New Age guru.

https://creation.com/genesis-correctly-predicts-y-chromosome-pattern

From the article:

“Evidence against false views about the Jews
Are today’s Jews really descendants of Abraham?
The Hungarian-born Jewish author Arthur Koestler (1905–1973) theorised that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are really descendants of the Khazars, who allegedly converted en masse in the eighth century in what is today modern Russia.7 However, Koestler was prone to anti-establishmentarianism, and this Khazar conversion theory could have been motivated by his desire, as a secularised Jew, to assimilate with gentiles and avoid persecution.

The idea has been widely discredited by reputable historians, because the real history of the Jewish people is far too well documented to sustain such an idea. They point out that the theory presupposes lots of gentiles assimilating into Jewish society, the exact opposite of what normally happens where Jew/Gentile intermarriage occurs. In reality only a tiny number of Khazars converted to Judaism, while far more converted to Islam and also some to Russian Orthodoxy. The Khazar converts to Judaism had disappeared by the 14th century, largely by being incorporated into already existing Jewish communities in Poland. There is also a problem of what happened to the real Jews who are supposed to have mass-evangelised the Khazars, then disappeared without trace out of history.8

Many anti-semites quote Koestler as though he were verbally inspired, thus damning the Jews because they supposedly aren’t real Jews. Whereas the Nazis and those who absurdly called Jews ‘Christ-killers’ damned them because they were real Jews!

The studies by Hammer et al. shows that the Ashkenazi Jews really are the same people group as the other Jews, and that there is a common ancestry for the Cohanim from Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, so are the last nails in the coffin for Koestler’s idea.”

https://creation.com/israelite-genetic-history

From the article:

“The Khazar hypothesis
Once Need et al. discovered that one can statistically separate people with Jewish ancestry from a general population of Europeans,29 the race to discover ‘Jewish genes’ was on.

Even though there are clear patterns, the idea that there are exclusive Jewish genes was recently contradicted by Elhaik.30

He makes six major points, all of which are questionable.

I will restate them here:

It is unlikely that an ‘Israelite gene’ ever existed since Iron Age Israelite tribes exchanged genes with their neighbouring tribes.

Had there been a paternal ‘Israelite gene’ on the Y chromosome, it would have been lost due to the transition to matrilineal descent.

Had there been a maternal ‘Israelite gene’ on the mitochondrial chromosome, it would have been lost due to the initial period of patrilineal descent.

Had there been an autosomal ‘Israelite gene’, it would have been lost due to the high rates of movements into the religion.
Had there been an autosomal ‘Israelite gene’, it would not be unique to Jews due to the high rates of movements out of the religion.

Had there been an autosomal ‘Israelite gene’ that survived to modern days, it would have been extremely rare and undetectable by popular search approaches that prioritize findings common to a large fraction of Jews.

Points 1–4 depend on the degree of mixing with other populations, plus chance. Being that the Jews have always had a certain degree of separation from other cultures, the assumption should be that they may have maintained some genetic distinction. Point 5 is a given and is well attested to in the literature. This is one of the main reasons why there are no ‘Jewish’ genes. But this still does not mean there are no genetic Jews. We may not be able to positively identify a Jew by their genes, but when one does find genes common to Jews found throughout their current distribution, this is a strong case for the antiquity of Judaism. His final point 6 depends on the status of his Khazar hypothesis.

Elhaik has attempted to claim Eastern European Jews were descended from the Turkic Khazars of central West Asia.31,32 This seems to be a resurrection of the controversial ideas of Koestler.33 But this theory was quickly shot down by others. Specifically, it seems that his team’s use of the Georgian Jews as a proxy for the assumed genotype of someone from the now-vanished kingdom of Khazar was a mistake, for the Georgians are not only south of the Caucasus, but they cluster tightly with the Middle Eastern Jews in genetic analyses. Instead of being evidence for a mass conversion of Jews in ancient times, the data instead shows that the Ashkenazi Jews are related to those in the Middle East.34

Elhaik’s team has also attempted to claim that Yiddish did not originate in Germany but NE Turkey, along the Silk Road.35 This was also controversial, and both the methods and conclusions were soon strongly contradicted in print.36

I will leave it up to the interested reader to follow this up in more detail. There is some tit-for-tat going on in the literature,37 but my personal view is that Elhaik is wrong. I do happen to agree with one of his conclusions, that Jewishness is more of a religious and/or social construct than it is a biological reality, but I come to these opinions through very different means and I reject nearly all of his criteria. Plus, I cannot discount the multiple strands of genetic and historical evidence linking them to the biblical Jews. Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations have less than 40% European ancestry, and are more similar to each other than they are to Europeans in general. So even though there has been a significant amount of interbreeding among Jews and Europeans, the Khazar hypothesis is incorrect.”

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