You’ve said this a couple of times now, but even aside from whatever the Bible itself may say on the subject, this site would appear to put the lie to this claim:
Unless its quotes are simply fabricated, it cites 15 of the church fathers who appear to have taught eternal torment pretty specifically. Here are a few examples:
Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110 AD):
how much more if a man corrupt by evil reaching the faith of God. for the sake of which Jesus Christ was crucified? A man become so foul will depart into unquenchable fire: and so will anyone who listens to him.
Clement of Rome (c. 150 AD):
But when they see how those who have sinned and who have denied Jesus by their words or by their deeds are punished with terrible torture in unquenchable fire, the righteous, who have done good, and who have endured tortures and have hated the luxuries of life, will give glory to their God saying, ‘There shall be hope for him that has served God with all his heart!’
Tatian (c. 160 AD):
We who are now easily susceptible to death, will afterwards receive immortality with either enjoyment or with pain.
Irenaeus (c. 189 AD):
The penalty increases for those who do not believe the Word of God and despise his coming. . . . [I]t is not merely temporal, but eternal. To whomsoever the Lord shall say, ‘Depart from me, accursed ones, into the everlasting fire,’ they will be damned forever
All these (except perhaps Irenaeus, depending on when Augustine was writing) predate Augustine by minimally 200 years, thus Augustine cannot be said to have originated the concept of eternal torment (and “for most” is not, and never has been, the issue; the issue is that some will be eternally saved, while others will be eternally condemned, the relative proportions of each group being irrelevant so long as each is non-zero). They may all be wrong, but they certainly aren’t following Augustine.
This article:
…paints a decidedly different picture, but contains a whopper of a historical error:
Had our old English Bibles been translated directly out of the Greek instead of Latin, it’s very probable that the doctrine of eternal torment would never have found its way into our modern Bibles and theology at all.
They were. I can’t speak to the English translations before the KJV, but it was most certainly translated from the Greek. Latin manuscripts were available as well, of course, but they weren’t translating from them, rather from the Greek manuscripts available at the time. The magnitude of this error casts serious doubt on the entire article.
Edit: and that error isn’t alone. The article makes much of
St. Gregory of Nyssa, who lived from 335 to 395 AD.
…and says of him that:
This is a man who attended the first ever council of the Church in Nicaea.
Whether they mean that he attended the first ever church council, or the first such council at Nicaea, they’re wrong either way. The first ever church council is recounted in Acts 15, and took place in Jerusalem around 50 AD. The Council of Nicaea took place in 325 AD, 10 years before Gregory was born.
The credited author of that piece is “Brazen Church”–and while they’re certainly brazen, they don’t show much concern for historical accuracy.