Modern technology has led to the discovery of an old version of a Bible chapter hidden underneath a section of text for more than 1,500 years.

Grigory Kessel, a medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, used ultraviolet photography to discover earlier text under three layers of words written on a palimpsest, a piece of writing material where the original material has been erased. The technology allowed traces of the earlier writing to be revealed, Business Insider reported.

The Syriac manuscript, one of the earliest translations of the Gospels, was made in the 3rd Century and copied in the 6th Century. It is currently held in the Vatican Library.

The newly discovered text was an unseen version of Chapter 12 in the Book of Matthew. According to a press release about the discovery, one of the discoveries in the Greek of Matthew chapter 12, verse 1 said “At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; and his disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat,” the Syriac translation says, “…began to pick the heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat them.”

Kessel said the tradition of Syriac Christianity has several translations of the Old and New Testaments. Until recently, only two old Syriac translations of the gospels were known to exist: one in the British Library in London and another discovered as a palimpsest in St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai. The third Vatican manuscript was recently identified as part of the Sinai Palimpsests Project.

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