However, Decker does cite the NET bible note without correction on the issue of Junia. In footnote 93, he cites,

“When, however, an elative notion is found, ἐν (en) plus a personal plural dative is not uncommon (cf. Pss. Sol. 2:6). Although ἐν plus a personal dative does not indicate agency, in collocation with words of perception, (ἐν plus) dative personal nouns are often used to show the recipients. In this instance, the idea would then be ‘well known to the apostles.’ See Burer and Wallace, ‘Was Junia Really an Apostle? 76-91, who argue for the elative notion here.”"

It is this kind of misinformation which makes it impossible to have an unbiased conversation about gender. The text is clear that Pss. Solomon 2:6 does not contain the elative notion of episemos. It is deeply to be regretted that although the editors of the NET Bible are quite aware of this information, they are unwilling to edit this note.

It’s obvious why this is. James was addressing “the apostles and elders.” It has apparently been conceded in the NIV that this was a male-only audience (but where was Junia?). But back in Acts 1:16, Peter, using the exact same Greek phrase, comes out in the NIV as calling them “Brothers and Sisters.” Why? well, apparently because some women were present (v. 14). But was Peter addressing the women, or just the men? Because what he was convening was a church council to elect a man from among them to take the apostolic seat vacated by Judas. Doesn’t it make sense that the women were present, but not part of the voting quorum? As in 15:12, “the whole assembly?”

The NIV assumes a role of women in church leadership in chapter 1 that it turns around and denies them in chapter 15. This is not translation.

But perhaps a better analogy would be to a text about cricket, using words like “wicket” and “bowled” literally and in their technical cricketing senses. Such a text might be easily understood by any well brought up Englishman. But the only Americans who would understand it would be those who had had the privilege of being initiated into the wonderful game. That is not because the language is difficult, but because the text presupposes a basic understanding of cricket. Similarly, I can make a tentative suggestion that the New Testament, at least in part, would have been hard for most Gentiles to understand, not because the language is difficult but because a basic understanding of Jewish religion and culture is presupposed – but most Greek-speaking Jews would have had no problem understanding it.

But, more importantly, I don’t think the analogy to an equivalent style being the religious language of today holds. I think a better analogy would be to how British English is different than American English. A Brit might say, “We’re in a sticky wicket,” or “I was bowled over.” We Americans ‘get it’, though our reference is not as full as the Brit’s and the accuracy isn’t quite there. (And, obviously, we spell better, leaving off all those extraneous ‘u’ vowels. )

The original audience wasn’t the entire Greek world. It was more constrained than that. Though I also don’t think it was constrained only to those within the Church such that one had to be “on the inside” in order to know what was being said. In the text where Paul tries to make clear (though translations fail here) that clear communication is important, he refers to the outsider being convicted when the outsider hears what is being said (cf 1 Cor. 14).

“It is not as if its original readers would struggle through it with such difficulty as a modern schoolboy might experience in the reading of Shakespeare’s plays. The Greek of the New Testament is fundamentally the koine Greek of its time, not the Classical Greek of a bygone era. But it is not merely the common language of its era, and it does not represent the lowest and simplest form of the koine. It is the common language ennobled by an infusion of Jewish and Christian meanings for many words, and by many borrowings from the language of the Old Testament, chiefly from the Septuagint version. In short, it is ‘Biblical’ Greek. If we were to look for an example of an equivalent style in English, we would find it not on the street, but in religious writings, such as sermon collections, in which the style of the writer is much influenced by the language of traditional English Bibles, and in which words are often used in technical senses established by theological tradition.”

http://www.bible-researcher.com/language-koine.html

The report was produced by Collins dictionaries, and not by the NIV translation committee.

I don’t deny that the English language has changed, what I do deny, and deny very strongly, is that the language has changed so radically that a translation done as 1984 (or even 1971 in the case of the NASB) is now completely incomprehensibly and in need of a total overhaul.

But no one said that the NIV84 is completely incomprehensible, or that it needs a total overhaul. Most of it is still very comprehensible, and most of it was not overhauled.

Yet, people who work in the field of Bible translations expect us to believe that people who read books that are more than 100 years old, can’t comprehend a Bible translation written in their own lifetime unless it is updated and revised. This is patronizing nonsense.

By whose standard are we judging their comprehension? Everyone thinks they comprehend more than they really do. Good readers are quick to gloss over what they don’t know, filling in the gaps from what they do know. It’s not conscious. But we want better than that for the Bible, don’t we? I want Bibles that truly use the language of the average adult native speaker of English. And because the language of the average adult native speaker of English has changed in the last 30 years, our translations need updates. If it was up to me we’d be seeing daily updates of our translations (online of course.)

The worst thing that a writer can do is have low expectations for his audience, ‘oh no, this word has more than one syllable, no one will understand it, better substitute another word’.

There is no default translation – every single word has to be deliberately chosen by the translators. If you have two synonyms, one of which is widely used, and the other is obscure, why not choose the more widely used one? In my opinion “Arrogance” is a much better choice than “Overweening pride”.

And here are some stats:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=overweening%2Carrogance&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22overweening%22&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1961,cd_max:2000&lr=lang_en
I think it’s interesting to note that a big proportion of those most recently published books with the word overweening are dictionaries… I wonder if there’s a way to exclude those from Google Ngrams…

The Bible is an inherently difficult book, you do no one any favors by pretending that it is otherwise.