In his 1982 course at the Collège de France, Foucault analyzes practices of care of the self in Antiquity. Part of his discussion focuses on exercises used by individuals to constitute an appropriate ethics of the self. Foucault indicates that, in the 1st and 2nd century CE, one of the elements of these exercises of self is constituted by reading and writing. In writing in particular, one is able to memorize and internalize truths that are intended to prepare the person to confront difficult situation. Foucault insists on the fact that the reading and writing practices in Antiquity were not simply intellectual or spiritual practices. They had a physical dimension. The sentences read and written needed to become embodied, so that they were part of the person almost physically. Foucault also indicates that the truth that one learned had to bring the person to practice this truth in life. Through practices, the logos needs to transform itself in ethos, and allow the person to be the truth he has learned. In this paper, I explore how Foucault’s analysis of stoic practices of reading and writing sheds light on how Paul’s exhortative sections, in particular in Romans, can be seen as attempts to construct the self of his readers so that they will embody the ethos that Paul is describing. When Paul uses formulas like “being clothed in Christ” (Rom 13:14; Gal 3:27; ), or “living to the Lord” (Rom 14:7-8), he employs powerful physical rhetoric that suggests that the Christ believers’ relationship to Christ needs to be more than spiritual but requires of the Christ believers to be the truth that they now embrace. Using Foucault’s analysis of practices of care of the self, I would like to discuss the possibility that the physical images that Paul uses present his addressees with an embodied rhetoric that aims not only to describe an ethos but also to make this ethos effective in the addressees. Viewed in this light, the paranetic sections of Paul’s letters in general and of Romans in particular can be seen as working tightly together with the more “theological” sections in order to construct a new self for the addressees.