The Codex Vaticanus is the oldest and most complete manuscript of the Christian Bible. It was written in Greek in Israel around the year 350 CE. For most of the nineteenth century, the manuscript was closely guarded by the Vatican librarians and was almost inaccessible even to scholars. Current scholarship considers the Codex Vaticanus to be one of the best Greek texts of the New Testament.
In 2005, Ardon Bar-Hama spent three days in the vault of the Vatican digitally photographing each of the 1500 pages of the codex. The project also included the photography of four Hebrew illuminated manuscripts ranging from the 12th to the 15th centuries that the Vatican lent to the Israel Museum.
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