The Shroud of Turin, a 14-foot-long and 3-foot-wide stretch of cloth mysteriously imprinted with a faint, brownish image of a naked man and wounds that mirror those of a crucifixion, has inspired decades of debate over whether this particular shroud was buried with Jesus and depicts him.

It’s been called the most scrutinized artifact on earth, but to the faithful, the Shroud of Turin signifies the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Still, the 14-foot-long and 3-foot-wide stretch of cloth mysteriously imprinted with a faint, brownish image of a naked man and wounds that mirror those of a crucifixion, has inspired decades of debate over whether this particular shroud was buried with Jesus and depicts him.

Although the northern Italian city of Turin has housed the shroud since 1578, the relic took center stage in St. Louis last weekend.

Forty experts, scientists and enthusiasts introduced the latest research surrounding the so-called burial cloth of Jesus at an international four-day conference.

The last Shroud of Turin conference was in Columbus, Ohio, in 2008. The Archdiocese of Turin is also planning a public exhibition of the relic in 2015 that Pope Francis is expected to attend.

Russ Breault, who first became interested in the Shroud of Turin when he wrote about it for his college paper, delivered the opening talk focusing on how the pattern of wounds on the man seen on the shroud — markings consistent with a crown of thorns, a pierced wrist and what appear to be blood stains — correlate with what the Gospels tell us happened to Jesus.

For Breault, the question — “Could this be the burial cloth of Jesus?” — is one worthy of rigorous pursuit.

“This is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the world,” Breault said. “It all comes down to possibility and what that possibility represents.”

To others the puzzle surrounding the origins of the cloth was solved in 1988 when laboratories in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich, Switzerland, all determined through carbon dating that the Shroud of Turin originated around 1260 to 1390.

“These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval,” researchers at that time concluded. The dating matches the first known reference to the shroud in church history.

And yet, confidence in the shroud’s authenticity has endured.

John Beldon Scott, director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Iowa and author of “Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin,” said the shroud continues to fascinate enthusiasts because, unlike other religious artifacts, it invites viewers to interpret.

“The visual experience of seeing that particular relic is quite unusual,” Scott said. “It really requires the participation and the imagination of the viewer.”

The mystique of the cloth is also enhanced, he said, by the fact that it is rarely on display.

There are also those who were never convinced by the carbon-dating results. They argue the research was compromised and that the tested fragment was actually a medieval piece of cloth added to the artifact to repair damage, which resulted in a false reading.

“The radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic,” Raymond Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told the BBC News in 2005.

Some, like art historian Thomas de Wesselow, have even attributed the belief in the resurrection and consequent spread of Christianity to the Shroud of Turin, arguing that when Mary Magdalene and two other women approached Jesus’ tomb what they saw was actually a cloth with an image of a man.

The Roman Catholic Church itself has come somewhere down the middle with regard to the authenticity of the shroud. Although it has not declared the artifact a bonafide relic, since it was willed to the Vatican in 1983, the popes themselves have venerated the object.