Captain Kirk versus an alien Jesus? That’s right. According to The Hollywood Reporter, an early Star Trek film script featured Kirk fighting an evil alien Jesus Christ.

The story is featured in the new book, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman.

In the oral history, Star Trek writer Michael Jan Friedman says Gene Roddenberry’s early film draft featured some unusual elements:

Gene had written a script for the first Star Trekmovie. Certain elements showed up in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but most did not. So there was this mysterious script floating around that people talked about as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls. After I had written several successful Trek novels, Trek editor Dave Stern asked me to turn Gene’s efforts into a novel called The God Thing. To the best of my recollection, I received both the script and a short narrative version of it. Naturally I jumped at the chance to translate and expand it. Gene was — and still is — one of my heroes, for God’s sake, no pun intended. As he had already left the land of the living, this was a unique opportunity to collaborate with him. But when I read the material, I was dismayed. I hadn’t seen other samples of Gene’s unvarnished writing, but what I saw this time could not possibly have been his best work. It was disjointed — scenes didn’t work together, didn’t build toward anything meaningful. Kirk, Spock and McCoy didn’t seem anything like themselves. There was some mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff in there that didn’t serve any real purpose. In the climactic scene, Kirk had a fistfight with an alien who had assumed the image of Jesus Christ.

So Kirk was slugging it out on the bridge. With Jesus.”

The new Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Beyond, comes out in theaters on July 22nd. 

What do you think? Are you a Star Trek fan? Would you have watched Kirk battle Jesus?