Tony Jones has been getting up early for ten years and refusing to talk to anyone until he has written for hours. Now we know why. Son of Helena is the first book of a trilogy about Constantine — a figure Tony correctly calls a cipher, the empty container into which everyone who loves or hates the marriage of church and state pours their own opinions — and nobody had ever written the historical fiction. Not one. Twenty-five novels about Julius Caesar, several about Nero, Claudius for Claudius, and nothing on the man whose name gets thrown around in every progressive Protestant conversation about Christendom. So Tony wrote it. Or rather, the muse handed it to him during a hypnic jerk on a plane home from the worst family vacation of his life. What follows is a coming-of-age story that ends in 306 — before everything you think you know about Constantine happens — and centers his mother, Helena, the concubine with an unshakeable faith who is the actual argument of the title. We covered why fiction lets him say things nonfiction can't, why he told almost no one he was writing it, the moral imaginary of Rome and why it is so hard to get modern readers inside it, and then a rapid-fire debunking segment where I brought clergy hot takes from the internet and Tony took them apart one at a time. Bring your church history notes. You will be editing them.
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The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together.
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Theology Beer Camp Online: TBC26 FM Edition
Theology Beer Camp is less than 2 months away and if you’re not coming to Kansas City, I get it. Flights are expensive, the world is ending, your dog has opinions about being boarded.
Here’s the good news: Theology Beer Camp is coming to you instead.
Online tickets for TBC26-FM are live. Join us online by clicking here.
And get this – the online experience has been upgraded!
We built a whole live podcast stage this year, which means you now get TWO live feeds to bounce between all weekend. Hop between the Main Stage with all our keynoters and the live God-pod stage, which surprisingly offers nonstop podcast excitement. Watch one, watch the other, get FOMO about both simultaneously. It’s a very spiritual experience.
Oh, and it’s all recorded and available for replay, along with the recordings from the three stages.
30 scholars. 30 God-pods. October 8-10. (One month before the election, which we did not plan and are choosing to interpret as prophecy.)
What you’ll need to supply yourself: the beer, the snacks, and a plausible reason for why you’re crying (or shouting) at a podcast recording on a Saturday morning. Everything else is handled.
Sorry we cannot livestream you a hug from a stranger in a Battlestar Galactica shirt, but we’ll see you on the frequency,
Tripp
P.S. The in-person ticket may get you Kansas City, but the online ticket gets you the same great content and your sweatpants. We’ll let you do the math.
Highlights from the conversation with Tony
Why nobody had written this book. Ten years ago, flying home from a Costa Rica vacation so bad the whole family got sick, Tony had a half-asleep hypnic jerk and the thought arrived fully formed: write a novel about Constantine. He assumed the Amazon search would turn up a shelf of them. Nothing. His agent told him first-time novelists should never write a trilogy, so he tried to compress it into one book, got to a projected thousand pages, and went back to the trilogy — and stopped listening to the agent, who is no longer his agent. On staying quiet about it: Stephen King’s On Writing on drafting with the door closed. Tony knew the slightest criticism would derail him, so he told almost nobody. Ten years of self-doubt, in private.
The title is the thesis. In Roman naming convention, sons are identified through fathers. Calling it Son of Helena is an argument. We know almost nothing about the relationship between Constantine and his mother beyond the fact that she was close to him and in his court, so Tony reached for the analogue a century later — Augustine and Monica, the overbearing pious mother chasing her brilliant son from Africa to Rome to Milan. That dynamic becomes the spine: he loves her, and he is constantly rolling his eyes at her. Helena as Tony wrote her is broad-shouldered, big-featured, and possessed of a calm confidence she uses to negotiate between an abusive father and a resistant son — and to walk into a plague-stricken city and kiss lepers, fully believing she is protected.
The rapid debunking segment. Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome — untrue, and it is not close. The so-called Edict of Milan was not an edict, was not issued from Milan, and was not issued by Constantine; it was a letter Licinius circulated in the East ending the persecutions and returning confiscated church property, and Christianity is not mentioned by name in that portion. What most people think happened in 313 actually happened in 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica. The Council of Nicaea decided the biblical canon — it did not, and never debated it; it did pass canons on things like the punishment for stealing a virgin and what to do about priests castrating themselves. The Arch of Constantine celebrates a Christian victory — it has zero Christian imagery, and the friezes were peeled off other monuments and re-carved. Also: there is no record of any Christian ever being put to death in the Colosseum. Constantine kept Sol Invictus on his coins nearly to his death and kept the title Pontifex Maximus.
Sol Invictus and the nascent monotheism nobody teaches. Aurelian reigned only five years but promulgated the Cult of the Unconquered Sun across the empire — Sol Invictus as god among gods, king of kings. December 25th was his dies natalis, the day the sun begins winning again. Sunday was the venerable day of the sun. Most historians of religion, Tony notes, think Constantine’s conversion was in some measure a synthesis of Apollo, Sol Invictus, and Christ — which is part of why he sat at Nicaea rolling his eyes. Tripp’s add: read the Latin philosophers on Plato’s logic of the one, the Neoplatonists, and the shift in Judaism from divine-council language toward stricter monotheism. If you are only hitting the ecumenical councils, you are seeing isolated data points inside a much larger shift in Western consciousness.
The moral imaginary of Rome, and the honor-shame world. The hardest writing problem in the book: how do you portray a world where the sanctity of human life as we understand it simply does not exist — exposure of unwanted infants, slavery as unremarkable furniture, the sexual use of any unfree person — without every modern reader concluding these people were monsters? Inside their own moral universe, it made sense. And pietas is not piety: it is duty to gods, family, and state, with no requirement of interior warmth. The novel dramatizes this when the semi-divine Diocletian — who by this point wore a god’s clothes, wore makeup, and forbade anyone from looking him in the eye — summons a young Constantine and orders him to go make things right with his father. Guilt as an interior category barely exists yet; Augustine’s pear tree, a hundred years later, is the pivot toward the modern world. (Which is also why Tony’s chief complaint about Nolan’s Odyssey is that Odysseus feels guilty about the Trojan Horse. The Greeks were not anti-war. War was the thing.)
Tillich’s anxieties, and what Christianity actually offered. Tripp’s closing frame, from The Courage to Be: the ancient world’s anxiety was fate and death — a cosmos that is powerful, personal, and not on your side, read through entrails and horoscopes. The medieval-into-Reformation anxiety was guilt and condemnation. Ours is emptiness and meaninglessness. So what landed? Tony: the Roman pantheon was fickle, arbitrary, and endlessly accumulating — twenty clay figurines on every hearth, a dozen temples in every town, and a transactional calculus about which god you need for rain versus for battle versus for a baby. Christianity arrived with a God who was neither fickle nor arbitrary, who does not change, and who was nothing like a bigger version of a human being behaving badly. And the offense of it, spoken by a slave to Constantine: we killed him on a cross. A dead Jew. I want a God who doesn’t die.
About our guest
Dr. Tony Jones is a theologian, historian, and now novelist — and, by his own count, the most frequent guest in the history of Homebrewed Christianity (he passed Pete Rollins a while back). He was a classics major with Greek and Latin, did a foreign study program in Rome, still leads history tours there, and focused on the early church in seminary. His nonfiction includes Did God Kill Jesus?, The Teaching of the Twelve (on the Didache — whose Eucharistic liturgy shows up in a catacomb scene in this novel), The New Christians, Postmodern Youth Ministry, and his memoir The God of Wild Places.
The book at the center of this conversation is Son of Helena, volume one of his Constantine trilogy — available now, with the audiobook out on September 1. Volume two, The Sign, releases October 1, and Volume three, The Apostle, releases December 1. All at tonyjonesbooks.com.
Tony’s own reading recommendations for going deeper: Paul Stephenson’s Constantine: Emperor, Christian Victor; Timothy Barnes’s Constantine and Eusebius (dense but unparalleled); and Mary Beard’s SPQR and The Roman Triumph.
