Israel Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the Dead Sea Scrolls that shed light on the life of Jews and early Christians at the time of Jesus, said it would take more than two years to complete the project to make the ancient documents available online.

Using powerful cameras and lights that emit no damaging heat or ultraviolet beams, scientists in Israel have been able to decipher sections and letters in the scrolls invisible to the naked eye.

The scrolls, most of them on parchment, are the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible and include secular text dating from the third century BC to the first century AD.

A team of specialists has taken 4,000 pictures of some 9,000 fragments that make up the scrolls, which number 900 in total. A few large pieces of scroll are on permanent display at the Israel Museum.

"We are able to see the scrolls in such detail that no one has before," said Simon Tanner, a digital expert from King's College London, who is in charge of data collection.

Infrared technology is uncovering new text on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient biblical writings found by a Bedouin shepherd in a desert cave 60 years ago.

Israel's Antiquities Authority has begun photographing the thousands of fragments and scrolls for the first time since the 1950s and it wants to put those new images on the internet for everyone to see.

Head of conservation at the Authority, Pnina Shor, began the project as way of monitoring the scrolls to make sure they were being held in the right conditions, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News says.

But then the infrared images that came back began revealing letters that had never been seen before.

"You should have seen us. The first day that we saw the new infrared images... you know it's like letters coming back to life," she said.

Professor Steven Fassberg, a scrolls expert from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says every new letter revealed will make a difference.

"If you have the first two letters and you get a third letter, already you are in a much better position to guess what the word is," he said.

"It's also important linguistically. Sometimes it'll help distinguish between verbs that are past tense and verbs that are present tense.

Dr Greg Bearman, who recently retired as the principal scientist of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is now working on the scrolls, said that "if you'd wanted to do this a decade ago, you probably would have looked at it and said, no, it's too big a project".

Even now the project will take up to five years to complete, ABC News says.