Mithras is a perennial favourite for online nonsense. It seems that “AI” is parroting a strange article, attributed to Reinhold Merkelbach, and appearing on the fake “Britannica” website. 
Britannica went out of business sometime in the 1990s, destroyed by the rise of the personal computer. Nobody knows who owns it now, or who actually writes the articles. I have often found them full of crude errors.
Reinhold Merkelbach was indeed a substantial scholar, but he has been dead since 2006. So he most certainly did not edit that 2025 article.
In fairness, it might be that the article draws upon some older article in which that scholar of an early generation expressed ideas that were already obsolete. But this I cannot tell.
The statements made in that article seem to reflect the pre-1971 idea that Roman Mithras – not recorded before AD 80 – “must” be the same as the ancient Persian cult of Mithra or Mitra.
But the 1971 conference on Mithraic studies demolished this idea very thoroughly. The archaeology of Mithras is very distinctive, especially the underground temples. But not one of them is known from outside the Roman empire. And all the earliest archaeology comes from Rome. If you look at Vermaseren’s two mighty volumes, the Corpus Inscriptionum Monumentumque Religionis Mithriacae, you see a man who still places the eastern material first. But that eastern material betrays the problem: it is a shabby, thin collection. The section on Rome dwarfs it.
It was therefore impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Roman cult was a fake. It was like the Greek “Zoroaster” literature – something which appears to be oriental, but is in fact home-grown, and merely dressed up in foreign garb. This sort of barbarian appeal is something known in our own times, from the popularity of the fakir in Edwardian drawing-rooms, and the guru in the hippy movement of the 1960s.
The “AI” practice of producing a digest of random nonsense, treated as authoritative by the young, is a real curse. For the unwary look no further. All sorts of ideas that many of us laboured to combat are now reappearing.
I have found that my own website of Mithras material is now slipping down the algorithm. Today I have moved it to a subdomain, so it can be now found at https://mithras.tertullian.org. Old links will redirect. Why? Because dear old Google won’t recognise any site as a “site” unless it is on its own domain or subdomain.
I have also today discovered that Twitter has allowed it’s “twitter card” product to decay. Tweets including material from my site just bring up boxes with no images. I’ve tried to fix that today, but it may take a little while.
Of course large corporations have the resources to fix these things. It is the ordinary chap who is left behind. Yay for the internet of corporations.
I’ve been away for a few days, but I return to a full inbox – that curse of the holiday-maker! My apologies if I have not got to your email yet.