Does Rejecting Hadith Mean You are Going to Hell according to Traditional Muslims?

I heard this argument once from Traditional Muslims. They assert that if you reject Hadith, you are rejecting the words of the prophet and so you are rejecting the Quranic commandment of “obey the messenger”.

However, even among Traditional Muslims, one classical Hadith compiler, Bukhari has rejected almost 600,000 hadith because of some issues he has seen in them. Even currently, many Sunnis and Shia Muslims reject hadiths they consider as weak based off of problems in the chain or other issues they can identify.

However, when you reject that many hadiths, inevitably many of them would be false attributions to the prophet and many of them would be true attributions of the prophet even though they have a weak chain. Even true hadiths that have been identified as weak were thus likely rejected by any given Muslim.

So that means rejecting something that is true from the prophet based off of concerns you have with the hadith is ok according to Traditional Muslims. In other words, as long as you think a hadith is false/weak, you can reject it without any issues to your salvation. That means a Quranist rejecting hadith in totality because they genuinely see issues with the whole hadith methodology should also be okay by that same logic. Thus you don’t have to accept Hadith for salvation, even according to the Traditional Muslim’s logic.

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