Both Peter Brown’s chapter “The Conversion of Christianity” and Larry Hurtado’s “The Early Christian Preference for the Codex”  focus on a time in history in which Christianity was beginning to spread throughout society. The church was starting to have a greater influence over the community, and both writers choose to write about different aspects of this. While both Brown and Hurtado focused on this time period, they chose to take very different approaches. The most obvious differences between the two pieces of writing are their use of evidence and their intended audience which also creates different tones.

Brown’s writing is focused on many aspects of the spread of Christianity during this time, and is extremely dense with facts. He does not cite any of his facts, which shows that he is pulling his evidence almost all from his own personal knowledge. He does this in order to establish credibility for himself in order for his audience to take his perspective seriously. It also seems to assume that the audience already has a good amount of knowledge on the subject and will not question the evidence he uses. For example, Brown says “the ‘Great Persecution’, which began in 302 and continued spasmodically for a decade, came as a brutal shock to respectable Christians” (Brown, 86). By doing this, Brown suggests that he is possibly disputing another author whom he does not name. He also provides pictures in his chapter which do not serve much purpose other than to give the reader an idea of the specific time period he is talking about. It is clear that his target audience is people who already have a great deal of knowledge on the subject– possibly historians– because Brown does not provide much explanation about his concepts.

In Hurtado’s writing, he focuses more specifically on the Christians’ use of the codex, and his use of evidence is very different from Brown’s. The chapter is full of quantitative data in the form of percentages. He gets his data from a source called Leuven Database of Ancient Books, an example of which is when he says, “of the total number of items classified in the LDAB as rolls (3,033), only about 81 (2.7%) are identified as Christian” (Hurtado, 47). Because of this use of data, it seems that Hurtado is aiming to inform his audience about something they do not have much previous knowledge about. He does not use pictures like Brown, but includes graphs at the end of his chapter in order to provide the reader with a more visual representation of what he is saying. Because of this approach, it creates a more informative tone throughout the chapter.