Romans to Jews - The Bad News Before the Good News

The way of reading romans i find entirely unhelpful and a mystifying with regard to many things that paul says. Paul's talking to communities, so he's addressing a range of house churches in rome where there is division at work between two groups of house churches. The weak are gentiles that imagine that they need to convert and become jewish. And the strong are confident that they can remain in their gentile identity, their non jewish identity, and be followers of jesus. Aney this is one of the ways that they are seeking to establish place of superiority against the strong.