Thomas Paine on Moses, the Bible, and history.

"My intention is to show that those books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them and still further, they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterward that they are no other than attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived, and also of the times prioir thereto, written by some very ignorant and stupid pretenders to authorship several hundrerd years after the death of Moses, as men now write histories of things that happened, or are supposed to have happened, sevral hundred or several thousand years ago". 

PAINE, Thomas. The Age of Reason (Part II).

[compliments of Paine scholar and colleague, Salim B.]