I doubt if you will like my sources, which I admit are internet-based, but maybe we can start here:
Mithra in the Roman Empire
Subsequent to the military campaign of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, Mithra became the "favorite deity" of Asia Minor. Christian writers Dr. Samuel Jackson and George W. Gilmore, editors of The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (VII, 420), remark:
One can't, despite the somewhat dated nature of its content, get far into understanding the Hellenistic mysteries without addressing Burkert's Antike Mysterien. This includes the relationship between the Mithras cult and Christianity. However, whether one sees the Mithras mysteries specifically, or the mystery cults in general, as "religions" at all rather than a loose narrative related to a semi-fixed set of ritual practices, one still has to deal with our sources. A central source, and one of the reasons behind the assumption that the Mithras had much of a following at all during the period of the Roman empire, is the writings of Christian apologists who either wished to demonstrate that Christianity could be palatable to pagans, or that various pagan practices not only offered nothing Christianity did not also have, but were perversions of Christian practices. So despite the fact that we have no evidence the cult existed until the beginning of the 2nd century/end of the first, and that our non-Christian sources consist mainly of imagery, many authors followed Cumont in painting a picture of a much more cohesive practice and one with a wide-spread following than the evidence warrants. Martin's paper on the topic (published in the edited volume Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christianities, 2005) is not only helpful in demonstrating how Christian texts in the Roman empire skew reality by painting other practices (from Mithraic to other Christian sects) as conceptually cohesive rivalries of christianity, rather than the loose set of narratives and practices they were, but also how little we actually no concerning the practices of the mysteries of Mithras. In particular, Martin points out (here as well as in his paper on Mithras published in the journal Numen vol. 36 pp. 2-15), that modern research on the mysteries of Mithras and the slaying of the bull indicate that this was "a cosmic image rather than the narrative event of transformed Persion myth" (p. 8 of the paper in Numen). In fact (from the same paper) "This increasingly public nature of third century Italian Mithraism suggests no other significant interaction between it and Christianity than a competition for available real estate in the crowded, public areas of urban Rome by two recently introduced and rapidly expanding "eastern" cults." (p. 5). As for the relationship between the Roman mysteries of Mithras and the Persian deity, the literature is too vast even for a representative bibliography, but a single paper (e.g., Sick's 2004 paper "Mit(h)ra(s) and the myths of the sun", vol. 51(4) of Numen) will suffice to demonstrate what all approaches have in common: the two are quite different, so pointing out that the Persian deity predates Christianity is meaningless.
We have an actual scrap of John's gospel which is from around the middle of the 2nd century. In other words, we have an actual piece of papyrus dated from that time which was once part of someone's copy of John, which was written last (compared to the four canonical gospels, at least).As one important example, the canonical gospels as we have them do not show up clearly in the literary record until the end of the second century.
Let's just start here. What does Herodotus actually say? In Greek:Mithra's pre-Christian roots are attested in the Vedic and Avestan texts, as well as by historians such as Herodotus (1.131)
τούτοισι μὲν δὴ θύουσι μούνοισι ἀρχῆθεν, ἐπιμεμαθήκασι δὲ καὶ τῇ Οὐρανίῃ θύειν, παρά τε Ἀσσυρίων μαθόντες καὶ Ἀραβίων. καλέουσι δὲ Ἀσσύριοι τὴν Ἀφροδίτην Μύλιττα, Ἀράβιοι δὲ Ἀλιλάτ, Πέρσαι δὲ Μίτραν.
"Although from the beginning they [the Persians] sacrificed to these [deities] only, they later learned to sacrifice to the heavenly [goddess], being taught by the Assyrians and Arabians. But the Assyrians call Aphrodite "Mylitta", and the Arabians, "Alilat", and the Persians "Mitra." (translation mine).
So apparently worship of a goddess mentioned in Herodotus is evidence for a god somehow. I'm not sure how, but apparently Acharya (whose work, apparently, continues to mislead no matter how many actual specialists on the Roman empire, Hellenism, or early Christianity demonstrate the problems with it) thinks that the worship of this Goddess is somehow evidence of a pre-Christian Jesus-figure.
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