The earliest surviving complete Latin Vulgate Bible is the Codex Amiatinus, produced in AD 700 at a Benedictine monastery in northeast England as a gift to Pope Gregory II.

The Latin Bible is made up of a large book of over 2,000 pages. Nineteen and one-quarter inches long, thirteen and three-quarter inches wide, seven inches thick, and weighing more than seventy-five pounds, the Bible takes up as much space as five hundred and seventy eggs.

After Abbot Ceolfrid died en route to delivering the Codex Amiatinus to Rome, its journey culminated at the Monastery of San Salvatore on Mount Amiata in Tuscany. It remained there for nearly a thousand years until it was given to the Laurentian Library in Florence.

As the oldest complete copy of the Latin Vulgate, older than the then-known Hebrew manuscripts used by Protestants, it helped the Church win the “struggle for textual priority” during the Counter-Reformation.

In 1587, Pope Sixtus V consulted the Codex Amiatinus to create the Sistine Vulgate, the first papally authorized Vulgate Bible.
Pope Pius X acted similarly in 1907, producing a definitive edition of the Old Testament by the Benedictine monks of Rome.

In 2018, the Codex Amiatinus arrived in England for the first time in 1,300 years.

It was the centrepiece of a “once in a generation” Anglo-Saxon exhibition at the British Library in London.