The Holy Shroud of Turin - revered by Catholics for centuries - is a piece of linen woven between AD1260 and 1390. Therefore the image it bears cannot be the imprint of the bloodstained body of the crucified Jesus Christ.
The news, confirming rumours and leaks which began circulating from the first weeks of radiocarbon dating tests on the shroud, was announced yesterday by Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero, the Archbishop of Turin. He said that scientists at laboratories in Zurich, Arizona and Oxford had checked the ages of historically authenticated samples of cloth and cuttings from the shroud and were '95 per cent' certain of their findings.
The shroud, 14ft 3in long and 3ft 7in wide, bears a faint yellowish negative image of the front and back of a man whipped, speared, nailed to a cross and crowned with thorns. Cardinal Ballestrero said that the church had never claimed that the shroud was a holy relic: its symbolic importance remained.
'The church believes in the image and not in the history because this image of Jesus Christ in fact is very interesting and the people believe deeply in Jesus,' the cardinal said.
At a press conference in London, Dr Michael Tite, keeper of the British Museum research laboratories, who masterminded the three tests, and Professor Edward Hall and Dr Robert Hedges of Oxford, who conducted the British radiocarbon dating, all confirmed that there could be no serious doubt in the results. They also denied knowledge of any of the 'leaks' which dogged the experiment. These, they said, were the result of informed guesses by the press.
Their finding, they said, was consistent with the known historical evidence for the shroud, which was first recorded in about 1389 by the Bishop of Troyes. He described it as a cunning forgery and said his predecessor had met the forger.
Professor Hall, who heads the Oxford research laboratory in archaeology and the history of art, said he was not disappointed in the result. 'I have to admit I am an agnostic and I don't want at my time of life to have to change my ideas.'
But that is not likely to be the end of the story: there are still mysteries wrapped in the shroud. Pathologists, artists and scientists have been puzzled at how a 14th century forger could have simulated complex details such as gravity's effect on blood flows from wounds in the hands, feet and side.
'Essentially we have an incomprehensible, extraordinary object. We now know its age but not its origin,' Professor Luigi Gonnella, scientific adviser to Cardinal Ballestrero, said in Turin yesterday.
'It is not a painting, it has no pigments. We know the red stains are blood, but we do not know of any mechanism in the Middle Ages that could put blood on a cloth.'
He said church officials are angered by claims that because the shroud has a medieval date it must be a fraud, a fake or a forgery. 'A forgery means it was made for the specific purpose of deceiving people. This is possible but there is no proof of that. It could be a medieval icon.'