Both Peter Brown and Larry Hurtado explore the same topic, just in different perspectives. Brown in his book, The World of Late Antiquity, explores the spread of Christianity in the fourth century as a whole, while Hurtado in his book, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, explores the spread of Christianity with the concrete example of Christian codices. These authors manage to write about a similar topic in ways that are vastly different from one another. Brown is more opinionated and fluid, while Hurtado is more objective and disconnected.

Through his writing, Brown makes it clear to the audience that he is well educated in the spread of Christianity during the fall of the Roman Empire. Brown’s style of writing almost plays out as a story, following a series of events in great detail while maintaining a steady flow. He seamlessly transitions from sentence to sentence while simultaneously integrating a mix of both facts and opinion. Although Brown layers his writing with vivid imagery and historic context, he makes no effort to include citations of source material, indicating to the reader that he is well informed on the topic and does not rely on any resource to recall information. This establishes Brown’s credibility on the subject, strengthening his argument. Also, the lack of citation within his piece helps to create a smooth narrative style making it possible for Brown to gain a connection with his audience. Setting up this connection between him and his reader facilitates Brown’s goal of persuading the reader to see the spread of Christianity through his own perspective. Of course, it is safe to assume that Brown’s intended audience is that of individuals who are informed about the topic at hand, due to the fact that Brown describes events, places, and people that the average person does not know about.

Unlike Brown, Hurtado’s style of writing is very informative, completely excluding bias from the text. Hurtado’s objective is made clear through his lack of emotion in the passage. His goal is to inform his audience as much as he possibly can. Hurtado refuses to share his opinion on the subject in order to give the audience a chance to form their own opinion, eliminating the possibility of skewing their perspectives. The reader can only assume that because of Hurtado’s completely informative and objective style of writing, that Hurtado was writing to people who might not have had prior knowledge about Christian codices. Because Hurtado writes in an explanatory and monotone manner he loses a personal connection with his audience. Which in this case is fine, due to Hurtado’s main goal simply being to inform, not persuade. Also in contrast to Brown, Hurtado used sources and cited them by using footnotes on every page.