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I was wondering. How come The New American Bible (the Catholic Bible) has 3 books in it that the one I have, The New King James Version , doesn't?

The New Amercian Bible has the books Wisdom and Sirach (which come after Song of Songs) and Baruch (which comes after Lamentations).

Why is this?

The books of the so-called "Apocrypha" (or Deuterocanon if you're Catholic) were removed by Martin Luther during the Reformation. This was due to 1)Theological differences- the seemed to support some doctrines that he did not agree with, and 2)Translation Issues- There were no original Hebrew manuscripts of these books. The oldest available were in Greek (This incidently, was also St. Jerome's quibble). However, it should be noted that Hebrew manuscripts of some of these books were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

*note: Some fundamentalists also try to insist that these books were added to the Catholic Bible by the Council of Trent (the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation), however this is unequivocably false. The deliberations that decided the contents of the Bible (OT and NT) took place in the late 5th century AD at the Councils of Hippo and Carthage (and one other that I've forgotten), and were also confirmed by the pope at the time.

lets see here.. i believe Marceian, was the first to write his own cannon of scripture, but this man hated the Jews, and left out everything that had to do with them. (hows hate and Christ work???)

Justin Marter saw what Marceian was doing and started his own cannon, (much closer to our own today).

the 3 counsels are:
1st, Counsel of Layodecia (363 A.D.) -- this is like the current Protestant bible, it only lacked Revelation. the counsel only took the list as information... no action.

2nd, Counsel of Hippo (393 A.D.) -- Athanaus presented a Cannon to the counsel and included Revelation and it was accepted. (for the counsel).

3rd, Counsel of Carthage (397 A.D.) -- the same cannon as Hippo, but it was finally publically announced as the Cannon of Scripture.

*my spelling may be off on some of the names... but hope this helps.*

Thanks for correcting me on the ates Saint, I was trying to work from memory ata bout 7 am this morning when I wrote the last peice.

The Council of Laodecia's list is most like the Protestant bible, except that it omits Revelation and includes Baruch. The lists provided by the Councils of Hippo and Carthage are identical to the ones in the Catholic Bible (and reaffirmed at Trent)

Thanks everybody. I didn't know anything about this. This really helps.

Hmm. I have some... disagreements... but there's no point bringing that up. The issue of the Catholic Apocrypha isn't really a big deal. They're basically history, of the time between OT and NT (correct me if I'm wrong). What you need to be more worried about are some other books that have been called the Apocrypha (because they are apocryphal) but aren't the one's the Catholic Bible has. Some of them have some extremely messed up stuff in them...

Yeah, I've read some of those, and actually own a copy of the Nag Hammadi codex (which contains mostly gnostic material). They can make for interesting reading though as long as you're not trying to take any kind of guidance from them.