A COPY of the world's oldest bible that has been made available online will help unlock several mysteries of Christianity, experts say.

The Codex Sinaiticus was hand-written by four scribes in Greek on animal hide in the mid-fourth century around the time of the Roman emperor Constantine.

Head of Western manuscripts at the British Library Scot McKendrick says that the digitising of the historical artefact means academics can examine the early workings of Christianity.

"The limits on access to this manuscript previously have meant that people have tended to dip, so that they have seized on particular things,” Mr McKrendrick said.

"This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation,” he said.

The Bible's remaining 800 pages and fragments - originally some 1,400 pages -contains half of the Old Testament. The other half has been lost while some pages have been rendered unreadable.

ccording to McKendrick, the digitising of the Codex Sinaiticus was a four year project that allowed experts to uncover evidence that a fourth scribe had worked on the text.

"The Codex … is arguably the oldest large bound book to have survived," McKendrick said.

"It marks the definite triumph of bound codices over scrolls - a key watershed in how the Christian Bible was regarded as a sacred text," he said.

The assembly of the book includes previously unpublished pages of the Codex found in a blocked-off room at St. Catherine's Monastery, at the foot of Mount Moses, Sinai, in 1975.

Collections of sections of the bible are currently held by the British Library in London, the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, the National Library of Russia and Leipzig University Library in Germany.

The Bible can be viewed online at www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/, includes modern Greek translations and some sections translated into English.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25744859-23109,00.html

While the Codex contains all of the new testament, it also includes part of the old testament and originally contained the entire text of the christian bible. The manuscript also includes the Apocrypha, 14 disputed books of the Old Testament that are usually omitted from the Protestant Bible. It also includes two early christian texts, the epistle of barnabas and the shepherd of hermas.