All about Al Bukhari

I quote from the hadiith quite often, and generally you will find the reference to one of two men (though I do sometimes use others): Al Bukhari, and Muslim. Both of these men were Muslim scholars who put together collections of hadiith that came to be regarded as authentic for various reasons. Christianity has no clear parallel to the hadiith, but maybe you could think of it as a collection of early Patristic material which has been carefully edited to remove spurious writings.

But here is some info on Muhammad al Bukhari, one of those two scholars, maybe I will post some info on Muslim (that was his given name) some other time:

Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari. Popularly known as Al-Bukhari (Arabic: البخاري) or Imam Bukhari (810-870), he was a famous Sunni Islamic scholar of Persian ancestry, most known for authoring the hadith collection named Sahih Bukhari, a collection which Sunni regard as the most authentic (Arabic: Sahih) collection after the Qur'an.

Bukhari was born in July 20, 810 CE (Shawal 13, 194 AH ) in the city of Bukhara, in what is today Uzbekistan. His father, Ismail Ibn Ibrahim, was a known hadith scholar that died while Bukhari was young...

At age of sixteen, he, together with his brother and widowed mother made the pilgrimage to Mecca. From there he made a series of travels in order to increase his knowledge of hadith. He went through all the important centres of Islamic learning of his time, talked to scholars and exchanged information on hadith. It is recorded that he stayed at Basrah for four or five years, and in the Hijaz for six; while he travelled to Egypt twice and to Kufah and Baghdad many times.

When the authorities in Basrah received information of his arrival, they fixed a time for him to deliver a lecture. At the lecture, he was able to confine himself only to such Hadith as he had received on the authority of the early Hadith scholars of Basrah, and had nonetheless been unknown to the audience.

... [He] devoted himself to the collection, study, proof-reading, organizing (arrangement) of traditions (Hadiths). For that purpose he traveled all over the Islamic world, all the way to Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Iraq, seeking hadith narrators and listening to them. It is said that he heard from over 1,000 men, and learned over 600,000 traditions, both authentic and rejected ones, and thus became the acknowledged authority on the subject.

After sixteen years' absence he returned to Bukhara, and there drew up his al-Jami' al-Sahih, a collection of 7,275 tested traditions, arranged in chapters so as to afford bases for a complete system of jurisprudence without the use of speculative law, (see Islamic Law). His book is highly regarded among Sunni Muslims, and considered the most authentic collection of hadith (a minority of Sunni scholars consider Sahih Muslim, compiled by Bukhari's student Imam Muslim, more authentic). Most Sunni scholars consider it second only to the Qur'an in terms of authenticity...

From Wikipedia.