Many have been asking about the fantastic and intriguing cover art to my new book Jesus from Outer Space.

It’s an original painting by artist Rena Davonne. It’s intentionally psychedelic-conceptual, in keeping with the mystical and hallucinatory origins of the Christian religion, and the mod-style feeling of the title. It evokes an aesthetic and an abstraction; it shouldn’t be taken literally. Obviously, the thesis is not that Jesus flew down to a geocentric earth in a cross-shaped spaceship, nor that the outer reaches of space really were so colorful to the naked eye.

But the elements are indeed a silver spaceship-like cross descending from the stars toward earth (if you look closely, to Palestine in particular) through a geocentric universe as seen through the eye of the mind, in the very sense described in the writings of the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria. Philo describes how the universe looks differently to those who can see with the mind; most of which features are invisible to ordinary sight. You are thus here seeing the rings of the cosmos, occupied by their corresponding geocentric planets (Moon, Venus, Mars, and so on), lit up according to their respective harmonies and ethereal elements.

Among the “planets” so schemed is the Sun. So the star you see way off above left is the True Star, after which all stars are but mere copies—another thing Philo explains in his works. In Christian conception—for example, as Ignatius describes—at the resurrection Jesus became that True Star and shined from the heavens to the eye of the faithful with a light brighter than any normal star—and Satan and all other celestial beings were compelled to bow thereto. This is indeed the kind of weird thing ancient Christians believed, dispelling the anachronistic insistence today to imagine they had perfectly normal beliefs like buttoned-up modern-science-tending Christians today.

If all of that sounds bizarre, it is. Actual ancient conceptions of how the universe looked and worked were that psychedelic and bizarre, a fact most modern interpreters don’t know or forget. Which is an underlying theme of the whole book. Hence it’s a theme of the conceptual art fronting the book. Rena did an outstanding job.

Rena Davonne sells a lot of brilliant pieces in the same style. And she will gladly do work on commission. I highly recommend checking out her Facebook page @artbyrena. And contact her there about how to get prints or originals or commission a piece.

I’ll conclude with a sample of her work so you can see what I mean. For instance, she just completed this:

Her style can range from almost impressionist:

To abstract realism…

To the outright abstract…

And in case you wanted to know, here’s the full original work featured on the JFOS cover: