The school of interpretation associated with Antioch is better understood as a habit of reading than as an institution with a building. Its teachers, among them Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom, held that a passage meant what its writer meant in his own situation, and that any spiritual sense had to grow out of that history rather than float free of it. Alexandria read the same texts allegorically, treating the letter as a shell around a higher meaning. Neither side rejected the other method outright, but the difference in emphasis was real and it had consequences.
Those consequences were Christological. A reading that held firmly to the humanity of the gospel narratives tended to describe Christ in terms that kept the divine and human natures distinct. Nestorius, formed in this tradition, was condemned at Ephesus in 431 for what his opponents took to be dividing Christ in two, and Theodore of Mopsuestia was condemned posthumously in 553. The Church of the East, beyond the Roman frontier, kept Theodore as its principal commentator and reads him still, so the Antiochene method survived in Syriac long after it was suppressed in Greek.
John Chrysostom preached in the city for more than a decade before being taken to Constantinople as its bishop. His Antiochene sermons include a series aimed at Christians who kept the Jewish festivals with their neighbours, which is evidence of how closely the two communities lived and a body of text with a long and damaging afterlife in later Christian polemic.