School of Antioch

The School of Antioch was one of the two major centers of the study of biblical exegesis and theology during Late Antiquity; the other was the catechetical school of Alexandria. This group was known by this name because the advocates of this tradition were based in the city of Antioch, one of the major cities of the ancient Roman Empire.

While the Christian intellectuals of Alexandria emphasized the allegorical interpretation of Scriptures and tended toward a christology that emphasized the union of the human and the divine, those in Antioch held to a more literal and occasionally typological exegesis and a christology that emphasized the distinction between the human and the divine in the person of Jesus Christ. The school in general tended to what might be called, in a rather loose sense, an Adoptionist Christology. Nestorius, before becoming Patriarch of Constantinople, had been a monk at Antioch and had there become imbued with the principles of the Antiochene theological school.

The school of Antioch is best divided into three periods:

• the early school (270-early fourth century)
• the middle school (350-433)
• the late school (after 433).

After the early school of Antioch came into decline, the presbyter Diodore of Tarsus re-founded it in the middle of the fourth century as a semi-monastic community.