Some of us can remember when executives had secretaries to whom they could dictate letters.  Usually, this worked well, but occasionally things could go wrong, as when the executive digressed into conversation, which the secretary included as part of the letter, or when the secretary, at the executive's request, included a well-used paragraph, but without making a clear transition.

Possibly we see some such phenomena in the epistles, as in chapter 2, when Paul goes into a long digression about the activities of some sinners, which does not further his argument, or later, when a dissertation on civil authority seems to have little to do with the particular problems of the church in Rome.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Paul recovers from his digression, and again puts forward his hypothesis that Christian Gentiles were "children of Abraham" -- the idea that we saw earlier in I Corinthians.  This time, however, Jews are not excluded, and a two-track theory is proposed "the circumcised shall be justified by faith and the uncircumcised by faith".   What then is the advantage of being a Jew?  Well......

Paul has been accused of many things, and he repeats some of the accusations.  Was he preaching the idea, that since forgiveness of sins involved the grace of God, we should sin more so that grace might abound?  This is the heresy of antinomianism, and is, in fact not confined to Christianity.  Paul strongly repudiates the idea.

To buttress his case, Paul uses long excerpts from Scripture.  On examination, they turn out to be a collection of somewhat out-of-context verses, taken from the Septuagint translation of several Psalms and a couple of sections of Isaiah.  One wonders what literature Paul carried with him, and it is tempting to believe that he carried "Verse of The Day" selections, particularly for the use of his Gentile converts, who might find wading through the whole of the Law and the Prophets rather heavy going, even if they had access to them.