to the Nestorian Schism, which separated the Church of the East from the Western Byzantine form of Christianity. The opponents of Nestorius attacked Theodore's School of Diodorus as well, and the Syrians answered by giving protection to the followers of Nestorius. In 489, the Byzantine emperor, Zeno, ordered the school closed for its Nestorian tendencies, and it returned to Nisibis. Centre of Syriac theology Back in Nisibis, the school became even more famous. It attracted students from all the Syriac churches, many of its students embodied important church offices, and its teaching was normative. The exegetical methods of the school followed the tradition of Antioch: strictly literal, controlled by pure grammatical-historical analysis. The work of Theodore was central to the theological teaching, and men like Abraham of Beth Rabban, who headed the school during the middle of the 6th century, spent great effort to make his work as accessible as possible. The writings of Nestorius himself were added to the curriculum only about 530. 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, 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, and the divide was worsened by interventions on the part of West Syriac miaphysites. Babai's attacks on Henana's one-qnoma theology came to be generally accepted by the Church of the East, though Henana remained a significant influence in the Church's subsequent tradition of interpretation. The controversy over Henana and the monastic revival initiated by Abraham of Kashkar, supported by Babai, diminished the school's influence, and the spread of other schools founded on its model throughout the Sassanid Empire also reduced its centrality. In the first half of the 7th century, after the death of Henana in c. 610, the school seems to have entered terminal decline. Influence on the West 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. The troubled times prevented their wishes from being realized, but Cassiodorus's monastery at Vivarium was inspired by the example of Nisibis that he