There are actually three official covenants on record. If you have an extra hour or two, you can trace the complicated series of scattered bible verses that were assembled into the argument for what's called covenant theology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_Theology

Your Christian friends can't tell you where it is in the Bible because it's not in the Bible. Or at least not directly because it is one of those "theologically implicit" arguments built out of various isolated references. Even as a true-believing Baptist teenager, this miasma of an argument clearly presented itself to me as what it is: quote mining from the bible to get to a conclusion you want.

The parts of the argument that come from the late epistles are especially suspect, since they may not have even been written by Paul, but may have been written by one of his later generation followers (who had to invent a working technology of salvation since the world failed to end as expected).

Most Christians won't be familiar with the term "Covenant Theology" or its stepchild "Dispensationalism" because they don't teach it that way. Instead, mainstream Christians learn a dumbed-down principle that they can always appeal to the authority of the old testament to support an argument (e.g. Gay is bad) but are not held accountable for the rules in the old testament (e.g. no wearing polycotton blends).

Sorry to tell you this, jread, but the version of the new covenant that you remember having picked up "through personal reflection, reading, and discussion" conforms exactly to the dogma in which most mainstream Christians are indoctrinated.

The fact that you can't point to exactly where it came from (even in the Bible) and the way that you apparently learned it apart from any history of the idea as a theological doctrine with its own history are both characteristic of what I personally feel is the most insidious part of the way this information is delivered.  People learn to accept it as true without questioning the validity or examining the origins of the idea.  It's just way too much like brainwashing.

There's a bit of a difference between laws and convenants in the bible text. Covenants are foremostly promises rather than having much to do with laws they are more like direct deals negotiated with God through representatives. According to Luke 22:20 and Mark 14:24 Jesus explicated directly a covenant in terms of his own blood. Whether this is related to the story of fulfilling the law is interpretative, though most of Christianity would hold that the two are related. In any case the statement of promise is a kingdom of heaven on earth and the deal is that everyone shares with each other in remembrance of the body and blood of christ. A fair bit nicer than bleeding lambs and circumcision and such which went before with the promise of lands, title and spiritual gifts attached to them, in any case.

I tend to think of covenants in the bible stories as the idea du jour of each prophet/god representative for the betterment of humanity. Abrahams people were perhaps seen to be greedy so it was thought good for them to practice giving up the best stock they had into nothingness maybe for the sake of appreciating everything a little more, David just thought the world would be better if he ruled it, and Jesus thought if the world shares more and thinks of something , seemingly, insignificant as bread as holy, it could only be better for them than moses's idea of mutilating themselves.. so he went with that and promised it would bring a good world. Or something like that...

Support for the "new set of rules" generally comes from the works of Paul and the pseudo-Paul's, and specifically their dissertations on "the Law".  I wouldn't stake my life on it, but I'm more or less certain that the bulk of this comes from the book of Romans.



The answer you get to such questions will vary widely.  Traditional Lutheranism posited the idea that the Law was meant to exhaust Christians, to ensure that they could not live life apart from God; it continues to have a place in the Bible, if only to show contemporaries just how good they've got it with their current salvation mechanism.  Calvinism put out the idea that the Law detailed the exact expectations of God, and that perfect life by the Law would be perfect obedience; Jesus was something of a contingency plan.

As for Jesus' fulfillment of the Law... "fulfill" has been read synonymously with "consummate" since at least the time of Augustine.  It's part of the territory of Christianity now, and has been since the Hellenization of Christian thought.  This likely was not the intention of the author of the statement, but... the intentions of the author are largely irrelevant.

Right, Brian brings up a good point that I forgot with regard to Covenant Theology.

When you read the mainstream gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) with the idea in mind that Jesus was a Jewish religious reformer, it makes a lot more sense.  His goal was to fix the problems at that time with the practice of the Jewish religion (especially priestly exploitation and corruption), not to found a new religion.  It's really only the epistles (Romans, but also esp. Hebrews and 1 Tim) that provide the necessary materials for building a new, non-Jewish religion.

That sense of the gospels not really saying what the church claims they say that Andyy mentioned only comes up, I think, when you try to cram Jesus's life and sayings into the mold of Christianity--a religion that would not exist until centuries after his death.