The star at Jesus' birth was a UFO

The argument

All throughout history, Jesus Christ and Christianity have been linked to alien activity including UFOs. Currently, there are two Egyptian texts being kept in separate American museums that suggest Jesus was an alien and a shape-shifter. One text details the betrayal of Christ by Judas and shows a conversation between the Jews and Judas: "How shall we arrest him (Jesus)? For he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man." We first hear about the Star of Bethlehem in the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible's New Testament. The Gospel states "Lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, til it came over and stood where the young child was”. It is believed by some that the star was actually a UFO, which the wise men followed after being motivated by alien telepathic communication. The Star of Bethlehem not only indicated the way the wise men should follow but also supposedly came to a stop twice: at Jerusalem and then Bethlehem. No natural phenomenon can justify this prodigy, and only an intelligent life form could be responsible. One common explanation for the star is that it was a comet, but no comet can guide someone in detail to a location; they are too fleeting. The likelihood that it was a meteorite is also slim because they are such a common phenomenon that the wise men (who were likely astronomers) would not have been so fascinated by it. The most popular answer for this magical occurrence today is that the star was planetary conjunction. Venus and Jupiter appeared so close together in the sky that they merged into one, extremely bright, super-star. This explanation is insulting to the intelligence of the ancient stargazers, who would have undoubtedly been aware of the locations of these planets. By eliminating possible astrological phenomenons, a UFO is the only possible explanation left as to why the star was moving.

Context

Conspiracy theorists have claimed that they have found the symbol of the crucifix on the surface of Mars. They believe that the discovery of this symbol helps prove that Christ was an extraterrestrial who sought to teach all intelligent forms of life across the cosmos about ethics and morality.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There has been no solid evidence to suggest that extraterrestrial life exists. If there are no aliens or signs of intelligent life outside of earth, it is clear that Jesus could not have been an alien, and the bright star that led the wise men was merely a star. Perhaps the wise men were not astronomers after all. If this is true, then they would not necessarily have been aware of the night sky and all its surroundings, and so the bright star that they witnessed could have actually been planetary conjunction between Venus and Jupiter.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise treats a narrative detail as an observation. The account appears in a single gospel, written decades after the events in a genre that uses celestial signs as a convention, and a star said to "stand over" a place is ordinary ancient idiom for a body seen low on the horizon in the direction of travel. No independent record of such an object survives from a period with active astronomical observation in Babylon and China. [Rejecting P2] The candidates have not been eliminated. A conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC, a later Venus–Jupiter conjunction, and a nova or comet recorded in Chinese sources have all been proposed and remain live. The reason given for dismissing them — that ancient astronomers would have recognised such phenomena — is in fact the point, since the magi are described as people who read the sky and drew meaning from what others could also see. [Rejecting P3] Elimination requires the list of alternatives to be complete, and the largest one is missing: that the detail is theological rather than astronomical. The step also substitutes an explanation with no supporting evidence for explanations that at least propose candidate objects, and it treats a shape-shifting passage from a late apocryphal text as corroboration — a separate claim resting on separate and equally unsupported ground.