A university student has cracked a religious code that has baffled historians for centuries.

Jonny Woods, 21, an undergraduate divinity student at St Andrews University, has worked out how to read shorthand notes left by leading Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller.

The student, from Coleraine, Co Londonderry, was able to decipher the shorthand after an academic at the university helped identify a longhand equivalent.

Mr Woods said it was exciting to crack the code enabling people to finally read documents Fuller, who is best known for founding the Baptist Missionary Society, left in shorthand.

"To be able to read something that no-one else has read in more than 200 years, it's not something I thought I would ever be able to do and it was an incredible moment" he said.

"It was quite a few weeks of tough and not very successful work, but eventually it paid off."

The breakthrough came after Dr Steve Holmes, head of the School of Divinity, found a shorthand document with the heading in longhand in the archive of Bristol Baptist College, which holds hundreds of pages of Fuller's sermons.

Dr Holmes found one headed in longhand "Confessions of Faith, Oct. 7 1783" with the rest of the document in shorthand.

Knowing this was the date of Fuller's induction into the pastorate of a church in Kettering and that he would have been required to give a confession of faith as part of that service, Dr Holmes wondered if a copy of the confession printed in a biography might help him crack the code.

After discovering the two texts were the same, Dr Holmes recruited Mr Woods through the university's undergraduate research assistant scheme to help.

After a few weeks, the student was able to translate the shorthand using the longhand version as a kind of Rosetta stone, allowing him to read two of the most historically significant sermons from the collection.

It is hoped that being able to finally read the documents will offer insight into Fuller's meteoric rise within the Baptist denomination, by revealing the early development of his thought.

Dr Holmes said: "When Jonny told me he could read these documents, it was an astonishing moment.

"Andrew Fuller stands as the figurehead, the 'patron saint' almost, of the church tradition of which I am a part.

"To be reading words of his that no-one had read since he preached them in 1782 - it's one of those moments you live for as an academic."

The translations of two sermons are now with the Baptist Quarterly under consideration for publication while Dr Holmes is continuing to edit Fuller's wider collection of sermons for a major new critical edition of his works.