One of his most famous students was Nestorius, who became Patriarch of Constantinople, but the doctrine he was preaching made him run afoul of Cyril of Alexandria.
The resulting conflict led to the Nestorian Schism, which separated the Church of the East from the Western Byzantine form of Christianity.
The exegetical methods of the school followed the tradition of Antioch: strictly literal, controlled by pure grammatical-historical analysis.
At the end of the 6th century, the school went through a theological crisis, when its director Henana of Adiabene attempted to revise the official exegetical tradition derived from Theodore of Mopsuestia.
The controversy over Henana divided the Church of the East, and led to the departure of many of the school's members,[7] probably including Babai the Great.
A focus of the controversy was the debate between supporters of a one-qnoma (roughly "hypostasis") and of a two-qnome Christology,[8] and the divide was worsened by interventions on the part of West Syriac miaphysites.
[13] The fame of this theological seminary was so great that Pope Agapetus I and Cassiodorus wished to found one in Italy of a similar kind.