Amen the apostles were definitely damnationists. No argument there, I’m so glad we can agree on something. So you know something they didn’t?
No argument there? Not true.
No, but I know quite a bit that you don't.
The Apostles and the Early Church Fathers of the Eastern/Greek church were what we now call Universalists.
The Western/Latin church gave us our Damnationist biased Bible which painted the Apostles as Damnationists.
Check this out.
"Taking
a rapid survey of facts, I think we may thus arrange early eschatological teaching. There were at first, probably, three distinct currents. Some held the final annihilation of the wicked; some, especially in North Africa, held their endless punishment; some, perhaps even
a majority, taught Universalism. By the days of GREGORY of Nyssa the latter view, aided doubtless by the unrivaled learning, genius and piety of ORIGEN had prevailed, and had succeeded in leavening, not the East alone, but much of the West (pp. 148-50). While the doctrine of annihilation has practically disappeared,
Universalism has established itself, has become the prevailing opinion, even in quarters antagonistic to the school of Alexandria.
The waning fortunes of the dogma of endless penalty soon revived, however, and in their turn gained the ascendency. The Church of North Africa, in the person of AUGUSTINE, enters the field.
The Greek tongue soon becomes unknown in the West and the Greek Fathers forgotten. A Latin Christianity, redolent of the soil, develops itself, assuming, in accordance with the Roman bent, a rigid forensic type. On the throne of Him whose name is Love, is now seated a stern Judge (a sort of magnified Roman Governor). The sense of sin practically dwarfs all else. The Father is lost in the Magistrate.
In the East the decay of the earlier belief was, if less rapid, nearly as complete. Strife within and without the Church, increasing ignorance and corruptions, bitter controversy (and other factors, p. 159) combined to form a soil in which the larger hope of earlier days at length dwindled and almost expired. Indeed, who can wonder that this was so, if he will but reflect how cruel was the age, how narrow is the natural heart of man, how slowly, even now, it responds to that which is most divine. The true wonder (to me, at least) is this, viz., the appearance in such an age as that of the later Roman empire of the very idea of Universalism - a phenomenon which can, I think, be alone accounted for by the fact that
the early Fathers found it, as they tell us, in the New Testament, p. 84."
Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter five