Today we published online an article called Jesus: Mithras or Reality? that made the argument that Jesus was in many respects just a reworking of the Zoroastrian god Mithra(s). I thought it was a amusing little piece with a pretty uncontroversial core argument – that religions borrow and steal from each other and gods overlap or are based on previous models – and it contained a bit of information that was new to me about the hero index.

But once we published it several people pointed out that the piece itself was recycled (from untrustworthy sources like the Zeitgeist conspiracy films) and repeated some claims about the similarity between Mithras and Jesus that are unsubstantiated and have in some cases been convincingly refuted.

This being the case we have withdrawn the article. Thanks to our eagle-eyed readers, and apologies for dropping below our usually high standards of fact checking and rationality.

Normal service is (we hope) resumed.