Chris

In general answer to several posts in this thread:

The Bible tells the story of God's plan to reach out to, and to bring back to himself, the human race. He has done this, down the ages, through a series of covenants (agreements), of which the New Testament (a.k.a. New covenant) and the Old Testament (old covenant) are the best known. In fact the Old Testament is not well named as there are several covenants in it - the Abrahamic Covenant (Abraham became God's man, the father of his people, and was circumcised as a sign of it) is one of them.

What people generally understand to be the "old covenant" is the Mosaic covenant, the one with the Ten Commandments, the rules for temple sacrifices and the civil law by which the nation of Israel was to live.

It is highly problematic to quote random edicts from this law and demand to know what
Christians think of it. The laws handed to Israel via Moses were products of their time, both in terms of human history and development, and in terms of Israel's understanding of and relationship to God. The Old Testament does have lots of useful material in it that Christians can learn from, but to the uninitiated it is far safer to stick with the New Testament. It's safe to say that aspects of Old Covenant life and morality that have persisted, are explicitly reaffirmed in the New Testament. (Which, incidentally, addresses the concept of "equal marriage" which someone mentioned earlier - in religious terms such a concept is not possible. It is perfectly possible to argue that couples should be treated equally under civil law, but the Bible's definition of marriage is male and female joined so that, in Gods eyes, they become one body. Male and male, or female and female, simply isn't marriage, and cannot be, under that definition. And there are warnings against homosexual activity in the New Testament; you don't need to rely on Leviticus to stand up in a pulpit on a Sunday morning and speak against it.)

Muslims consider the Quran to be a further development in God's covenant relationship with his people. If the Bible contains the Old Testament and the New Testament, then the Quran is, in effect, the Last Testament. For this reason, because it claimed to add to the teaching of the Bible rather than founding something new, the Roman Catholic Church for centuries considered Islam to be a cult, much as we consider the Mormons to be a cult (and as first century Jews considered Christians to be a cult) rather than a religion in its own right.