NEW YORK — After 10 years of intensive scientific inquiry, the verdict is in:
Whatever the enigmatic Shroud of Turin may be, it is not the burial cloth of Jesus.
The announcement was made Thursday by the Archbishop of Turin, Anastasio Cardinal Ballestrero, who said a Vatican-approved commission of scientists from Britain, Switzerland and the United States was 95 percent sure of the accuracy of its tests.
Ballestrero said independent carbon-14 testing in the three countries dated the 14-foot strip of linen, with its faint yellowish image of a scourged and crucified man, to between 1260 and 1390.
``I see no reason for the church to put these results in doubt,`` he told a news conference in Turin.
The Vatican statement, which had been expected for weeks, raises more questions than answers, posing a classic historical ``whodunit`` surrounding the shroud, which records show first appeared in France in the 1350s and has been in Turin since 1578.
If the shroud actually is the work of some unknown early Renaissance artist, he has had no peer before or since.
In 1978 a team of American scientists, utilizing every space-age test known except carbon-14 dating, examined the shroud in Turin, where it is kept as a venerated relic of the Catholic Church. Adding their findings to previous tests, they came up with a staggering profile of what that artist would have had to accomplish.
One thing was certain. The image could not have been that of a 14th Century corpse somehow transferred to the linen cloth. There was no trace of the chemicals that would have been associated with decomposition and the figure decidedly was that of a man who had been crucified-a form of capital punishment unique to the Romans and unused after the fall of their empire.
If an artist created the shroud, he did it with traces of blood, but no paint of any kind, scorching it in intricate detail on the very surface of the cloth. By means unknown to this day, he made it a photographic negative, rather than a positive, 500 years before the invention of photography.
He also managed to incorporate a unique three-dimensionality into the image that would not be detected until a 20th Century image analyzer, normally used to clarify space-probe pictures of the planets, revealed it.
To date, no other painting or photograph has proven to contain such undistorted three-dimensional properties. The mysterious artist had to have a knowledge of human anatomy, blood flow patterns and nerve reaction to trauma equal to that of the present day, as well as encyclopedic knowledge of Roman history and the Bible.
James Druzik of the Getty Conservation Institute in Marina del Ray, Calif., an expert in the conservation and restoration of art and cultural artifacts, theorizes that the image may be less a work of art than an accident.
``It still befuddles one on how it could have been made, but in this particular field, there is a lot of befuddlement on how things were made,`` he said. ``There are many, many articles that have transfer stains on their surfaces that were unintentional. Conservation literature is full of stains that occur from decomposition in products from wood to paper or textile. It`s so common that it`s not even remarkable.``
Druzik, a later associate of the American scientific team that ran the Turin tests, said the image could be one not of a corpse but a statue-a carved wooden icon, of which there were many in the 14th Century.
``People at that time had virtually no education by our standards today,`` he said. ``Even if you were a priest, your education was probably limited to theology, so you were probably spooked by anything you didn`t understand.
``If you had a piece of linen draped over a wooden icon, and you put it away someplace, and you came back 10 years later and found an image appearing on it, you`d be totally freaked out. With the first word-of-mouth transmission, it goes back 1,000 years.``
Druzik even has his doubts as to whether all the scientific tests run in 1978 and earlier were ``relevant.`` He said he takes the negative-image and the three-dimensional aspects ``with a grain of salt`` as possibly
coincidental, but he does concede that no paint pigment of any kind was found on the shroud, making it difficult to believe it is a painting.
``They had very little to work with,`` Druzik said of the scientific team. ``They strived with amazing creativity to find every conceivable approach to deriving information as to the origin and structure of the image. But the problem with looking at large objects with small-object technology is that it`s like looking through a keyhole and trying to determine the character of the person who lives in the room.``
Whatever the final conclusion, Dr. Harry Gove of New York`s University of Rochester, a physicist who initially was critical of the way carbon-14 tests were administered, said the shroud is almost as precious now as it would have been had the tests authenticated it as a true artifact of Jesus.