The manner in which the information about the early Christians and their willingness to adapt around the common citizen, and their affinity for the codex over the scroll was presented to me in two very different ways, both heavily capable of densely packing these unknown facts into my brain, but using different literary techniques. Brown appeals to an audience well versed in the topic of early Christian conversion, whereas Hurtado writes for an audience who benefits more from detailed, simplified description.

In Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity, the way he goes about presenting his information is strictly structured, descriptive sentences that leave the reader in between being confused and interested. He writes to an audience who he assumes knows as much or almost as much about early Christians as he does, leaving out cited sources and basing all his information on personal knowledge. Every claim Brown makes is fact, never doubting what he declares as true. The key idea to note when it comes to Brown’s writing style compared to Hurtado’s is that Brown provides almost no cited sources and relays his information from his own personal locker of knowledge.

When we read Hurtado’s second chapter of The Earliest Christian Artifacts, the methods he uses to present the arguments as to why the early Christians preferred the codex to the traditional scroll differs entirely from how Brown chose to approach the topic. With Hurtado’s writing style, we get a simpler, more structured presentation of each argument, with supporting data and cited sources, mainly from the Leuven Database of Ancient Books, or the LDAB. Hurtado presents much more quantitive data, using numbers, percentages, and graphs at the end of the chapter to convince his audience, and inform them that the early Christians preferred the codex to the scroll, and for what reasons. We can infer that the intended audience Hurtado is trying to appeal to knows very little about the “Earliest Christian Artifacts”, but after reading a single paragraph we learn enough information to present in front of an entire class. Every point he makes is easy to understand, it makes sense and requires little effort to process, making his writing style much more appealing than Brown’s.

Another notable difference between the way Brown and Hurtado present their information is that at times when Hurtado makes a claim or includes a cited source’s claim, he very often doubts the possibility of the claim. When he includes the quote by Eric Turner, who says that “large holding capacity was a prime recommendation for a papyrus codex”, he then goes on to explain that out of twenty-nine early codices listed by Turner that show such amount of writing per page, only one of them turned out to be identifiably Christian. Throughout all of Brown’s selection, he makes claims and abides by them completely.

Though Brown and Hurtado’s writing styles differ immensely, they both relay great amounts of information in professionally efficient ways.