ibn Hanbal; he related a ḥadith from Sufyān, so I said, “Yahya ibn Yahya disagrees with you.”
He asked, “How does Yahya report it?”
When I told him, he struck out his own narration and declared, “There is no good in any report that conflicts with the narration of Yahya ibn Yahya.”

Abu Ahmad al-Farrāʾ said: “I heard Yahya ibn Yahya—and he was an imam, an exemplar, a light of Islam.”

Al-Ḥākim said: “I heard Muhammad ibn Yaʿqūb, the ḥāfiẓ, relate: I heard our teachers say, ‘Had Yahya ibn Yahya lived another two years, his narrations would have vanished; for at the beginning, whenever he doubted a report he would transmit it as mursal (with a missing link), then he reached the point that, if he doubted a report, he simply abandoned it, and later he would even cross it out of his notebook.’”

Ibn Abī Ḥātim said: “ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad informed us in his book: I heard my father mention Yahya ibn Yahya (1), praise him, and say, ‘Khurasan has not produced anyone like him since Ibn al-Mubārak. We used to call him “Yahya the Doubter,” because of how often he questioned a ḥadith (2).’”

ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Muslim said: “I was with Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Marwazī and asked, ‘Which of the shaykhs you have met were upon the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ?’ He replied, ‘I know of none—unless it be Yahya ibn Yahya.’”

Ibrāhīm ibn Abī Ṭālib said: “Isḥāq read to us some ḥadiths from his teachers and remarked, ‘Yahya ibn Yahya narrated them to us, and he is the most trustworthy of all those from whom I have transmitted to you today.’”

ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥasan al-Dārābjirdī said: “I heard Yahya al-Himmanī say:”