I say: A narrator such as him may have his hadith graded sound, but not authentic. Ibn ‘Adi said of him (6/30):

“He narrated sound reports and uncommon ones. Al-Bukhari relied on him in his Sahih and narrated many reports from him. In my view, there is no harm in him.”

Al-Hafiz mentioned two corroborating reports for it, one from Abu Umamah and the other from Abu Hurayrah. I had previously documented them: the first under no. 2043, and the other under the hadith of Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri, no. 2044. Its wording is more complete, and it is a strong corroborating report for Fulayh’s hadith. Al-Hafiz should therefore have mentioned it, but apparently it did not come to mind, since Ibn Hibban was alone in narrating it. There, I had judged its chain authentic according to al-Bukhari’s criteria, based on the chain cited by al-Haythami in Mawarid al-Zam’an, which includes Khalifah ibn Khayyat, one of al-Bukhari’s narrators. It then became clear to me that this was an error—I do not know whether it was al-Haythami’s or the copyist’s—and that the correct name is Khalaf ibn Khalifah. Although he was truthful and one of Muslim’s narrators, he became confused in his later years; and I was unable to determine whether he narrated this before that confusion. Thus, his hadith is a good corroborating report for the hadith under discussion. And Allah knows best.

The referenced hadith of Abu Hurayrah is an abbreviated version, with the wording:

“You shall indeed enter Paradise, except whoever refuses and flees from Allah as a camel flees.”

I had attributed it there to al-Hakim alone, and I challenged his grading of it as authentic according to the criteria of the two Shaykhs, since its chain includes Isma‘il ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Abi Uways. Then I saw that al-Hafiz attributed it in Fath al-Bari (13/254) to both Ahmad and al-Hakim, and al-Hafiz said:

“Its chain meets the criteria of the two Shaykhs.”

The annotator of al-Ihsan (1/197) followed him in this judgment and in attributing it to both of them. What drew my attention was that, although he mentioned where al-Hakim had recorded it, he left a blank for Ahmad, without specifying its location.