the manner of someone unfolding a map stage by stage so that each new piece offers both a fresh vision and a sense of having been contained within what had gone before. At almost no point in this letter does he offer detached reflections on isolated “topics” (13:1–7 is perhaps an exception, which is one reason, though not the main one, why some have suggested that it may be an interpolation). Although Romans, written within the general Hellenistic culture of the Greco-Roman world, shares some rhetorical