The Sectarian Bias of the New International Version Bible (NIV)

Sources Critical of the NIV 

For those who love reading about Bible Translation, the following are good books done by experts and Bible translators that are very critical of the NIV:

From James Barr, in Modern English Bible Versions as a Problem for the Church_ 
Quarterly  Review/Fall 1994

But this was not the end of the story. If on the one hand the conservative acceptance of the RSV as usable betokened a certain willingness to work along with the main currents of Christendom, there still existed the impulse to evangelical separatism, the unwillingness to do anything or accept anything that was not totally and purely "evangelical." The most important manifestation of this
latter tendency is the so-called NIV, or New International Version, (New Testament, 1973; whole Bible, 1978).

The preface to this version begins with one of the most whopping falsehoods ever to be written into a Bible version by a group of "Bible believers" such as the promoters of the version were, for it says that the people who worked on the version came from many denominations and this "helped to safeguard the translation from sectarian bias." The contrary is the case; the NIV was a sectarian 
project from the beginning. It was, as it itself says, planned by committees of the Christian Reformed Church and the National  Association of Evangelicals. The name International, as is well known to anyone experienced in the literature, is a code word meaning "acceptable for conservatives and fundamentalists." The reason for the existence of the NIV is not, and never was, that it was in any way better, or had better principles of translation, or better scholarship behind it, or that it had solved the problem of style as between archaic "biblical" style and conversational "modern" style. Its reason for existence was purely and simply that it was produced by and for evangelicals and for them only."

The NIV Reconsidered: A Fresh Look at a popular translation by Radmacher & Hodges, "It (the NIV) does not possess either enough accuracy or enough stylistic to replace the versions that preceded  it." p. 132

Accuracy of Translation by Robert Martin, "The NIV is not worthy of becoming the standard version of the English-speaking world." p. 70

The Bible in Translation by Bruce Metzger, "It is surprising that translators [of the NIV] who profess to have 'a high view of Scripture' should take liberties with the text by omitting words or,  more often, by adding words that are not in the manuscripts." p. 140

See also "The Word of God in English - Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation" by Leland Ryken