This paper will examine how a particular set of values informed and structured the practice of hadith scholarship in the late second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries. Corresponding roughly to the century prior to the production of the “canonical” works of Sunnī hadith, this period witnessed the emergence of a community of specialists devoted to the collection and critical examination of hadiths. In spite of the formative influence of this period, much of the scholarship on this milieu has been focused on broadly diachronic questions of historicity, examining either the extent to which the milieu is faithfully portrayed in later biographical sources or more commonly the extent to which it was successful in preserving and transmitting authentic memories of Muhammad’s words and actions. Much less attention has been devoted to the synchronic question of the milieu’s internal dynamics and the shared values that bound its participants together in a common scholarly venture as they developed the methods and terminology for a newly emergent field of specialization. Through a wide-ranging examination of biographical literature on hadith narrators, this paper identifies and examines five values essential to the internal dynamics of this milieu: 1) the commodification of hadith, which came to be viewed as an increasingly valuable “possession” that one might go to great lengths to obtain and to guard; 2) intense competition for authority among hadith transmitters; 3) a high degree of student autonomy vis-à-vis teachers; 4) the increasing premium placed on accurate transmission; 5) attempts to define the parameters of acceptable belief and practice with varying degrees of stringency. Like any set of values, the logical extensions of the values identified here occasionally clashed with one another and particular values had to be either prioritized or subordinated, resulting in different practical outcomes. For example, a narrator who had learned hadith from a teacher who held beliefs that he deemed heretical faced the question of whether to prioritize boundary enforcement and abandon his hadiths or prioritize the value of the hadiths themselves and ignore his teacher’s heresy. Likewise, students were frequently caught between the dictates of deference to their teachers’ and peers’ assessments of other narrators and their desire to learn and transmit as many hadiths as possible. In conclusion, the paper shows how tensions between these competing values and the dominant approaches that developed to navigating them shaped classical theories of hadith scholarship as articulated in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries.