It is not unusual for a person’s remains to wind up in more than one place. Some people ask to have their remains divided, particularly if they die someplace far from their childhood home or another significant place.
Joseph begged his sons to take his bones with them when eventually they left Egypt, and they did so.
I think this has its roots from the Israelite concept of family burial, where generations upon generations of family members were interred together in the same location (hence the expression “
to be gathered with your fathers”). It was common back then for the bones of the deceased to be piled altogether in a common heap. In Iron Age Israel, when someone is to be buried, their corpses were first placed on a bench cut into the wall; and after it has rotted away, their bones were gathered into a recess hollowed out beneath the bench.
By the Second Temple period, however, perhaps due to the growing belief in the resurrection of the body, individual burials became common. Thus we see tombs which provided for individual burial of bodies, coffins or ossuaries in separate shelves (l
oculi) while at the same time allowing a family to be buried together in the same tomb.
Around the time of Jesus and afterwards, the popular custom in Roman Judea is to deposit the body of the dead person in the family tomb. This is what is called
primary burial. After about a year, when the flesh of the corpse has decomposed, the family members would then go back into the tomb to practice
secondary burial, where they would collect the bones from the shelf or niche where the corpse rested a year ago and then rebury them in some manner (say, putting them inside an ossuary, burying them on a pit dug somewhere on the corner, or placing them on a niche).
I’m puzzled by the claim that the skulls of both Sts. Peter and Paul are at the Lateran? Only St. Paul was beheaded . . . at what time did St. Peter’s skull supposedly become separated from the rest of his remains?
According to popular belief, the head of St. Peter was removed for safety in 846, when the threat of Saracen invasion reached Rome. Under Pope Paschal I (817-824), all the spoils of the holy martyrs were transferred into the walls of Rome, but that did not do much good for St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, both of which were outside the ancient fortifications of the city. Both basilicas were desecrated and and all their treasures looted and taken off.
