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In John 13:36 Peter explicitly asks Jesus, "Lord, where are you going?" Thomas asks essentially the same question in John 14:5. Then in John 16:5, Jesus says, "none of you asks me, where are you going?" — within the same Farewell Discourse. The Johannine author has Jesus deny that anyone has just asked him the question that two named disciples just asked him.
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Cited passages
Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered, “Where I am going, you can’t follow now, but you will follow afterwards.”
Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
Cited passages
But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This is among the cleanest internal contradictions in the Fourth Gospel, and it is a principal datum for the source-critical view that John 13-17 is a composite text. The three relevant lines, in order: Peter at 13:36 asks Kyrie, pou hypageis? — 'Lord, where are you going?'; Thomas at 14:5 says Kyrie, ouk oidamen pou hypageis — 'Lord, we do not know where you are going'; and Jesus at 16:5 says nyn de hypago pros ton pempsanta me, kai oudeis ex hymon erota me, Pou hypageis? — 'But now I go to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, Where are you going?' The same verb of departure, hypago, and the same interrogative clause, pou hypageis, recur across all three, which is what makes the collision so exact: Jesus denies that anyone is asking the very question two named disciples have already asked, using the identical wording.
The traditional harmonization, defended by D. A. Carson and Leon Morris, leans on the present tense of erota in 16:5 — 'none of you is asking me now.' On this reading, the earlier questions of Peter and Thomas were superficial or self-concerned (Peter immediately pivots to whether he can follow and his readiness to die; Thomas focuses on not knowing the way), and by chapter 16 the disciples have lapsed into sorrowful silence (16:6, 'because I have said these things sorrow has filled your hearts'), no longer pressing the inquiry. Jesus, on this account, laments not that they never asked but that they are no longer engaging with the meaning of his departure. The reading is grammatically possible — erota is indeed present and can bear a 'right now' force — but contextually strained. The complaint that 'none of you asks' lands awkwardly when two disciples demonstrably did ask, and the harmonization must supply a shift in the disciples' mood between chapters that the text of 16:5 itself does not mark.
The more economical explanation, defended across a broad range of Johannine scholarship, is compositional. Raymond Brown and Rudolf Bultmann both concluded that the Farewell Discourse is not a single seamless composition. The most cited aporia is at 14:31, where Jesus says egeiresthe, agomen enteuthen — 'Rise, let us go from here' — after which, instead of leaving, he continues speaking for three more chapters and does not actually depart until 18:1. The natural inference is that the original discourse concluded at 14:31 and that chapters 15-17 are a later supplement, drawn from Johannine community tradition and inserted before the closing words could take effect. Chapter 16 appears to have been composed without 13:36 and 14:5 in view, which is exactly why 16:5 can have Jesus say no one has asked the question those verses record. Bultmann's solution was rearrangement (textual displacement); Brown's and John Ashton's was redactional layering; either way the data point in the same direction — distinct compositional strata stitched together.
Craig Keener registers the harmonizing reading and the present-tense argument fairly, but the cumulative weight of the 14:31 problem, the doubled discourse material, and the verbatim contradiction at 16:5 makes the seams hypothesis the better account. It explains the contradiction without requiring Jesus to misremember a conversation from minutes earlier and without importing an unstated change in the disciples' demeanor. The harmonization rescues consistency only by reading into 16:5 a temporal qualifier and a psychological backstory the verse does not state.
Where the critical reading lands: a genuine internal contradiction, best explained as a seam between compositional layers in the Farewell Discourse.
Sources for this reading