Both Larry Hurtado and Peter Brown take on the task of developing a historical look at the early Christian tradition; however, Hurtado focuses on the actual form of Christian literature, while Brown focuses more on the story of the church in a chronological fashion. Furthermore, while Hurtado’s essay contains a vast amount of descriptive, quantitative data, Brown presents his argument with more vague, qualitative data.

In The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown presents to his audience an account of the early Christians with the assumption that his readers already have a lot of background knowledge of the subject. He takes little time to explain any of the events or people that he mentions, and he seldom defines any of the longer words he chooses, such as aggoramiento. Brown also includes his own perspective of the events, as his work is a response to Edward Gibbon. His aim is to persuade his reader to reconsider their interpretation of the events.

In contrast, in The Earliest Christian Artifacts, Larry Hurtado presents a less biased account of the preference for the codex book form that the Christians seemed to gravitate toward over the passage of time. He presents many arguments with sufficient evidence in the form of that from other scholars as well as statistical data regarding the increase in the codex form in which Christian literature was recorded in. He included such evidence and then usually stated his own claim at the end of each section; however, this essay seemed much less to have the goal of persuading the reader, as in Peter Brown’s essay, and rather to challenge the reader to form his or her own questions and opinions on the debate over the obviously preferred codex form.

While Peter Brown and Larry Hurtado take on a similar task, their approaches are very different. It is evident to the audience that Brown expects an educated reader while Hurtado expects his reader to know less about the subject, so he is more explanatory in his work. The contrast between the types of data is also very clear, as Hurtado presents a lot of numerical data while Brown presents more literary data. While they have different styles of writing, Brown and Hurtado’s works can be categorized into the same genre because they both take a look at the history of Christianity.