Is the agreement of three imams on authentication without a dissenting opinion considered a consensus?

The questioner : All right, our Shaykh, when you say they agreed, sometimes we find that the statements of the three imams are in the authentic collections and we do not find a dissenting opinion from them.

The Shaykh : May Allah reward you. The consensus of the Ummah is impossible in such issues. However, the researcher must devote his effort and act according to what he finds. Otherwise, knowledge would be suspended by assuming such possibilities. That is, when we authenticate a hadith and search to the best of our ability, there may be some routes or hadiths in the corners that hinder our authentication.

The questioner : Yes.

The Shaykh : This is certainly possible. Do we give weight to this possibility? No. A person must exhaust his capacity and effort to reach the truth in what people differ on. If three or four agreed on something, that is a blessing. It is possible that there is a report we have not received, or that a memorizer contradicted them. That may be the case, but we are only responsible for what our research has reached. The preceding imams, whose strength of memorization and retention we marvel at today, we assume missed a great deal, and there is no doubt about that. We sometimes perceive this in certain situations, but we do not hold that against them, because this is the nature of human beings.