He had nearly achieved it. Becoming emperor in his middle twenties, Caligula had become increasingly erratic and megalomaniacal, insisting on divine honors in Rome itself, something his predecessors Augustus and Tiberius had been careful never to do. One thing stood in his way: the permission given to the Jews to worship their own God in their own way. He planned to do to Jerusalem what Antiochus Epiphanes had done two centuries earlier, only more so; he would convert the Jerusalem Temple into a great shrine focused on a giant statue of himself. He would be the divine image in the holy place.
