  We study the asymptotic behavior of the ghost propagator in the quenched
SU(3) lattice gauge theory with Wilson action. The study is performed on
lattices with a physical volume fixed around 1.6 fm and different lattice
spacings: 0.100 fm, 0.070 fm and 0.055 fm. We implement an efficient algorithm
for computing the Faddeev-Popov operator on the lattice. We are able to
extrapolate the lattice data for the ghost propagator towards the continuum and
to show that the extrapolated data on each lattice can be described up to
four-loop perturbation theory from 2.0 GeV to 6.0 GeV. The three-loop values
are consistent with those extracted from previous perturbative studies of the
gluon propagator. However the effective $\Lambda_{\ms}$ scale which reproduces
the data does depend strongly upon the order of perturbation theory and on the
renormalization scheme used in the parametrization. We show how the truncation
of the perturbative series can account for the magnitude of the dependency in
this energy range. The contribution of non-perturbative corrections will be
discussed elsewhere.
