Daniel B. Wallace (Dallas Theological Seminary) adds: "The scholarship that produced this version is excellent, both in text and translation decisions."
However, many others have taken a dim view of the NIV Bible:
From N.T. Wright’s latest book, Justification –
"When the New International Version was published in 1980, I was one of those who hailed it with delight. I believed its own claim about itself, that it was determined to translate exactly what was there, and inject no extra paraphrasing or interpretative glosses. This contrasted so strongly with the then popular New English Bible, and promised such an advance over the then rather dated Revised Standard Version, that I recommended it to students and members of the congregation I was then serving. Disillusionment set in over the next two years, as I lectured verse by verse through several of Paul’s letters, not least Galatians and Romans. Again and again, with the Greek text in front of me and the NIV beside it, I discovered that the translators had had another principle, considerably higher than the stated one: to make sure that Paul should say what the broadly Protestant and evangelical tradition said he said."
"Once the committee got at its task, one discovered that his preparation was far too scanty. If one had written a PhD dissertation on each verse that was to be considered, he might have been qualified to deal with all the questions that could be raised. The individual traits of each committee member quickly surfaced. One had a special talent for recalling where a particular form had occurred before. Another could offer his training in Akkadian and Ugaritic; another in Latin and Greek. The Old Testament specialists were sometimes not aware that a passage was also used in the New Testament." Jack Lewis, The New International Version, Restoration Quarterly 24, p. 3
"Our conclusion is that the goal of accuracy frequently has been badly missed. In terms of style the NIV manifests many weaknesses, although very often it is extremely readable. But the number of stylistic problems is large, and the overall style seems to lack a certain cohesiveness. The lack of consistency in the NIV is also a major problem." The NIV Reconsidered by Radmacher/Hodges, p. 131
"The NIV is not worthy of becoming the standard version of the English-speaking world. Its accuracy is suspect in too many ways." P. 70, Accuracy of Translation-The Primary Criterion of Evaluating Bible Versions with Special Reference to the New International Version
Why? This same author goes on to say, "The dynamic equivalence translator tends to be relatively unrestrained in his theologizing. What a formal equivalence [Literal] translator generally does only as a matter of necessity, the dynamic equivalence translator often does as a matter of choice."
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
See also Poor and Misleading Translation in the New International Version (NIV)
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