I refuted that years ago. It’s massively ignorant. I have several chapters on this in Hitler Homer Bible Christ.

In short, it’s literally impossible (procuratorships were held by equestrians, not senators, and were private, not government positions, and none would ever be described as a “governor” of an entire province; moreover, the rank of quaestor was the only senatorial post concerned with money, and Quirinius had been far, far above that rank since 12 BC). And it is nonsensical (we know all the consular governors of Syria from 12 to 3 B.C., so Luke would have said their names, not some minor unrelated official; and Quirinius was waging a war in Galatia during Herod’s last years, so cannot have been running some strange financial sub-office in Syria that no one ever heard of). And so on.

Heubner makes a ton of other mistakes besides these, as well described by Dan McClellan. My chapters reinforce his points, too, with a lot more evidence. His point is that she has produced an unreliable tract of specious apologetics here, and not genuine scholarship. And I have to concur.

Link:

https://books.google.com/books?id=EymbDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=sabine%20huebner&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false

The story is fiction. But that’s the author’s intention, yes. He is lifting an idea from the Antiquities of Josephus to “tell a tale” about how Romans are misunderstanding Christians as seditious, by having an officer mistake Paul for the Egyptian, giving Paul opportunity to explain he’s a peaceful and harmless operator (as the ensuing narrative is entirely built to illustrate).

As history it makes little sense. A Roman commander would be way better informed about that and would not so stupidly ask his quarry to confess to treason. The only way he could think a random captive was that specific guy is if someone falsely accused him of it (which is not related in the story), and his response to that would not be to just take the captive’s word for it but to run an investigation as to who in fact he was and whether he could be the guy he is accused of being. That would entail bringing in witnesses who knew what the Egyptian looked like (i.e. he’d need evidence the accusation was true) and witnesses who knew where Paul was and was from and had been (i.e. he’d check alibis) and the accusers to interrogate them as to “how they know” he’s the Egyptian (i.e. he’d test for the accusers mendacity).

But to give just an example: Luke actually rewrote Matthew’s Nativity to push Luke’s agenda of representing Christians, and hence Jesus and his family, as law abiding citizens—in contrast to the fugitive outlaws that Matthew’s Nativity depicts them as. See OHJ, 472–73; with Robert Smith, “Caesar’s Decree (Luke 2.1-2): Puzzle or Key?,” Currents in Theology and Mission 7 (December 1980), pp. 343-51.

Yes. Most definitely. The same techniques Luke used to compose Acts, he used to compose his Gospel. I show this (with citations to the scholarship confirming it) in On the Historicity of Jesus (Ch. 10, section on Luke; a lot more scholarship confirming it has since published; I will cite that bibliography in a forthcoming volume).

Note that I don’t cite that article for any of these points. It is merely a reference link. The article you are reading here is the argument being made. You should never trust Wikipedia on any point of Christian propaganda. You should always check it against the facts. That is what I am doing here. So you can either trust dubious assertions, or demonstrated facts. That’s up to you. But the facts and scholarship proving Wikipedia wrong are provided here for you.

That Christian apologists don’t want Acts to be based on Josephus makes their opinions unreliable. Whereas the fact is, all the latest peer-reviewed experts on Acts agree Acts used Josephus. That’s in standard references now. If you are interested in exploring that debate, you can compare the assertions of Christian apologists with the conclusions of the arguments and evidence presented by the latest peer-reviewed experts, and see who is arguing speciously, and who is arguing soundly.

Meanwhile, regarding the titles, you seem to have mistaken what I said for something else. I never argue that Acts gets the titles wrong. Rather, I show here that the letter of Lysias presented by Acts does not contain Felix’s actual title (he does not call him a proconsul there, or even call himself a tribune; there are no official titles in the letter at all), not that Acts did not identify Lysias as a tribune or Felix as a proconsul. In other words, the author of Acts knows their titles, but then screwed up by not having them appear in a quoted piece of official correspondence—among many other mistakes, indicating the letter cannot be a copy of a real one. Maybe it is a paraphrase, but then that means the author is choosing what the letter said and not simply showing us the letter. And in any event, this is all addressed in the article here that you are supposed to be commenting on.

It states that the proconsuls were titled correctly and that Lysias was correctly called a tribune.
It states that most scholars agree that Luke and Josephus DIDN’T borrow from each other.

P.S. Do also note Acts invents a story whereby Timothy has a Jewish mother (warranting the compromise in his case). No such fact exists in Paul (of Titus or Timothy) or is even likely there (they are both clearly Gentiles with no imagined concerns about parentage). And Acts has Paul circumcise Timothy for the appeasement of local Jews (mission diplomacy), not Christian Judaizers (internal politics). Thus Acts is creating a diplomatic narrative that does not exist in Paul’s eyewitness accounts.