Over 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and made available on the internet.

More than half of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript has been pieced together in a joint effort between institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia.

Now high-resolution digital images of the recovered pages of the 4th century book - written in Greek on parchment leaves - have been made available at www.codexsinaiticus.org.

The project, which took four years to realise, used cutting-edge technology to reunite ancient pages, which have been kept in separate locations for more than 150 years.

In a collaboration between the British Library, Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia and the Monastery of St Catherine in Egypt, each of which hold different parts of the book, high-quality digital photographs were taken of each of the 800-odd pages.