Career of Severian as Conciliator

I don't think the narrative of The Urth of the New Sun covers all appearances of Severian as the Conciliator: 1. I recall a couple of references in The Book of the New Sun (spoken by ?Typhon, ?Agia) to the Conciliator having disappeared and reappeared. 2. In Urth, Severian wonders how many of the guests at the inn where he fights the zombie are him. At the time of his writing in Ushas, at least, he seems to assume either that he's going to do a lot more walking in the Corridors of Time, or that more replicas will be constructed in different threads of the tapestry of time. ...and I just noticed a Wolfean inversion between Book of the and Urth of the: In Citadel, Severian becomes the Autarch, "who in one body is a thousand" (ch. 27); whereas in Urth his one person is dispersed into a succession of bodies. Could we have the opinions of our knowledgeable Christian contributors on how these two details might reflect religious themes? -- Dan Rabin

Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is the 'miracle of bilocation,' whereby various Catholic saints have been known to appear in two or more places at the same time. (The first example I can think of is is Padre Pio.) Also, Jesus was known to mysteriously disappear from amongst crowds and show up somewhere else. You've also made me to wonder whether Wolfe, or you, were making a slight Heinlein reference:

Somehow this made me think of RAH's time-travel classic, "All You Zombies--"

There's never more than two of the protagonist at once in "Zombies", and "By His Bootstraps" only gets up to three. The earliest mention of mass time duplicates I've found so far was a Poul Anderson short.