QUOTE : Secondly, although it is likely that there was a longer period of<br />overlap between John and Jesus, the more weighty evidence implies that it cannot have been very long, and that the break between John and Jesus must have come quite quickly. After all, the central emphasis of their respective proclamations was quite different: John believed that the end-time was at hand; Jesus believed that the shift in the aeons had already taken place. And the decisive indication that the kingdom was present for Jesus was the presence of the Spirit working in and through him. The break between John and Jesus must therefore have been occasioned by Jesus' awareness of the Spirit: the eschatological Spirit was already upon him - therefore John's message and ministry was already superseded. How quickly Jesus saw these corollaries and applied them is not clear (the retreat to the wilderness is the obvious period of rethinking), but we should certainly hesitate to read too much into the Fourth Gospel's traditions about the overlap: they imply only a period of `competition' between John and Jesus, not a period when Jesus was John's disciple.