Thread by @shahanSean

The Muʿtazilī theologian Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 915) was once challenged because he accepted one prophetic tradition on the Medinan scholar Abū l-Zinād's authority but rejected another, though they shared an identical chain of authorities (sanad). How did he justify it? ...

We don't know which ḥadīth from Abū l-Zinād that Jubbāʾī accepted as authentic (ṣaḥīḥ), but we do know which one he rejected: the account of the disputation between Moses and Adam, which one finds in the Ṣaḥīḥ of Muslim. Like many other Mutʿtazilah, ...

Jubbāʾī set 3 criteria for accepting the authority of a ḥadīth; it must: 1) accord with the Qurʾan, 2) accord with communal consensus (al-ijmāʿ), and 3) accord with reason (al-ʿaql). His explanation for rejecting it follows this reasoning, as it fails on 3 counts in his view...

Adam defends himself against Moses’ reproach and bests him by noting that he could not but help to disobey God for thus “it was written” – i.e., foreordained. Jubbāʾī notes that, if Adam’s argument is valid, any sinner may cite the same excuse. Thus he struck his challenger dumb.

In Jubbāʾī's view, the ḥadīth thus contravenes reason, ijmāʿ, and the Qurʾān; therefore, it cannot be true.
This account comes from Ṭabaqāt al-Muʿtazilah of al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār, which one can read here:
menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/urn/urn:nbn:de…

For more on this topic, see Racha El-Omari, "Accommodation and Resistance: Classical Muʿtazilites on Ḥadīth," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71 (2012), pp. 231-256
jstor.org/stable/10.1086…