My last post had two attachments. Last attachment showed that there were at least 7 more witnesses who reported the same narration. The hadith narrators were evaluated on two qualities:
1. Uprightness - Trustworthy, honest, having good moral character.
2. Precision - Known for good memory, or preserving in writing from the time the narrator heard it from first hand source.
If in the chain of narrators any person was known to have a bad memory, then that hadith is generally classified as weak. Similarly, if any of the narrator was known as dishonest then any hadith narrated from such a person would be regarded as the most unreliable.
Now compare this to our justice system. Normally if we have two witnesses for any account, those are generally accepted as good enough. Normally the mental state and moral character of these witnesses is not investigated as thoroughly as it should be. Now compared this to the criteria above and also notice that we don't have just two witnesses, we have more than 8 in this particular hadith. So there were 8 witnesses in first generation, and as I mentioned above by the time we reached third generation we have over 20 narrators and they were all from different places but narrating the same action word to word.
Compare these to Gospels and then you can realize the beauty of hadith science.