I'm sorry, but you just don't get a Bayes Factor of 10^40 by considering the alleged testimony of people who have been dead for 2000 years. There have to be thousands of things which are many orders of magnitude more likely than this that could have resulted in the testimony being corrupted or simply falsified.

You don't even need to read the article to see that 10^39 is just a silly number, but for those interested, it is obtained by assuming that the probability of each of the disciples believing in the Resurrection is independent of the probabilities for the other disciples. Despite the fact that the independence assumption is clearly nonsense, and they themselves describe it as a "first approximation", they then go on to quote this 10^39 figure throughout the rest of the article, and in the interview.

I'm sorry, but it's this section where the paper just starts to get silly.

One hypothesis that need not detain us for long is that the disciples themselves did not believe what they were proclaiming, that they were neither more nor less than frauds engaging in an elaborate conspiracy.

Well, ok, that does sound pretty unlikely. But is its improbability really even on the order of 10^39? Have the authors actually thought about what 10^39 means?

If you took every single person who has ever lived, and put them in a situation similar to the disciples every second for the entire history of the Universe, you wouldn't even be coming close to 10^39 opportunities for them to make up such an elaborate plot. Are they really suggesting that it's that unlikely?