4:31 PM
@Nathaniel Good edit. I would point out, though, that the final quotation, by George Barker Stevens, is really not all that similar to the preceding one, by J. Gresham Machen.
Machen speaks of Christ as a new beginning, and implicitly, as a divine being, and the incongruity of such a figure coming from ordinary human parentage. Stevens, by contrast, focuses specifically on the issue of Christ's sinlessness as inconsistent with human parentage. The two are not the same, or really, all that similar.
Stevens's argument is, I think, a much weaker one, relying as it does on much later concepts about Mary's nature, the Immaculate Conception (which, I realize, was not adopted in Protestantism, but which seems to have affected Protestantism), and the heritability of sin itself vs. tendencies toward sin. I don't think Paul was engaged with any of these concepts or controversies. Making an argument that he supported the Virgin Birth on this basis is, I believe, quite anachronistic.