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It may be more than a pub, since the author may be aware of the etymology or have enough sense of it. If I speak of a butterfly flying like the movement of butter, I'm doing more than punning. I don't know if there's a name for that kind of figure of speech, but it's not that the word 'butterfly' means "fly that is like butter", and it's not just a pun. It's a recognition that it's a formerly compound word whose component words still exist. I think what you say in the last paragraph illustrates this well.

Jeremy: point well taken. By the way, concerning the etymology of 'butterfly', I had been told that it was originally 'flutterfly' and had become 'butterfly' due to a misprint in an early addition of Webster's Dictionary, and always found this anecdote rather humorous. However, I've just consulted OED on the subject and found that this is not the case and 'butterfly' does, for reasons unknown, actually come from 'butter' and 'fly.' Hmm...

Of course, since ekklesia and eklektos don't actually come from the same component words, juxtaposing those words would be either a pun or a false etymology. Interestingly, false etymologies were a common feature of classical Greek rhetoric, a practice which is satired in Plato's Phaedrus, so they may also appear in the NT. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of, for instance, ekklesia and klesis or ekklesia and the verb ekkaleo (a word which doesn't actually occur as a compound in the NT) would be a play on the true etymology as you suggest. When I say I suspect it is an 'intentional pun,' I mean, for instance, that I suspect that the juxtaposition of the words eklektos and ek + kaleo (uncompounded) in 1 Peter 2:9 is intentional. If this was Paul, I would suspect that he also intended us to notice the connection with the etymology of ekklesia, but I understand (not having read Peter's epistles in the original Greek, or studied them very closely in English) that Peter is not given to this kind of wordplay. I haven't actually been able to find other good examples.

If Karen Jobes is right, I Peter doesn't use such good Greek as to be impossible for a fisherman who grew up reading the Septuagint would be able to do. I don't know if that sort of pun would be out of reach.

Apart from those considerations, I do think it's pretty unlikely given the separated preposition.

Of course Paul knew Plato & co, since he was well educated and Greek philosophy was in those days the science. But that he chose the word ekklesia because of the Athenian democracy is the fallacy Tertullian fell for. Paul was not the originator of the word since we find already Jesus using the word in the Gospels, and in the context it is said to a Jewish audience, which of course causes us to ask whether they understood 'ekklesia' as the ancient Greeks did. Tertullian came to the conclusion that women did not belong to the laity and had no right to claim any "manly functions" and he can only have come to this conclusion if he interpreted 'ekklesia' to mean the Athenian concept: Athens was divided into 'demes', which were small communities with their own governors and financial admnistration. All male Athenian citizens who belonged to a deme, belonged also to ekklesia, the people's assembly, and had a seat and a vote. Women, slaves and foreigners were excluded. Because of the distance and, for some, poverty, not all citizens participated, until they began to receive a compensation for their time and travel. Ekklesia was responsible for making and changing laws, the army and the religious cults, electing citizens for certain offices and ostracizing citizen deemed dangerous for the state. Every citizen had the freedom of speech and the right to initiate.
If the church is like the ancient ekklesia, women are excluded from the covenant of God and are not part of the universal church, the body of Christ. If the Bible would have used the word deme, the comparison would have made more sense since women belonged to the deme, but not the Ekklesia. The inference that is made is that the local congregations are demes, but the government of the church as a whole is ekklesia, which is reserved for men. This is however not how the word is used in the Bible since the word deme does not exist in the Bible and both men and women belong to ekklesia. Therefore the biblical word ekklesia cannot have the same meaning as given in Athens.

Susanna, I certainly don't mean to imply that the usage of ekklesia implies identity with the Athenian political conception of the word - that is certainly false. Nor do I think that we should draw huge theological conclusions from the parallels in language and usage. I simply mean to claim that the usage of ekklesia and kerux in close proximity may have carried overtones held over from their usage in classical Athens, and the writers of Scripture may have used these intentionally.

For the record, it is my understanding that 1 Corinthians was written before any of the Gospels (but I'm not sure about that). At any rate, certainly there was the beginning of a Greek Christian tradition in the years between the Resurrection and the writing of the Gospels so, on the assumption that Christ taught primarily in Aramaic, it is probable that none of the Gospel writers, nor Christ in the flesh, were responsible for the use of ekklesia and kerux in Greek Christianity. It may very well have been someone who had a Greek education.

Finally, even if the parallel is not intentional, it is still instructive as to the meanings of the words. While we ought not to slip into the etymological fallacy described in this post, etymology is one relevant factor in determining the meaning of a word. In this case, there was a cultural connection back to the Athenian democracy present in some elements of the surrounding culture, even if the speakers themselves were not particularly interested in it, and that sort of thing influences the meaning of a word.