re: #3 SidewaysQuark

The biggest “suspect” is that someone just plain made the story up. That would be consistent with the rest of the (most likely fabricated) narrative about the birth of Christ.

Merry Christmas!

Biblical authors rarely just made things up. Their audience at the time would remember or record odd celestial events, so they would know if the teller of the story was just making up the new star’s appearance circa 0BC.

The event (whatever it was) was probably real, just connected to Jesus’s birth after the fact.