Hadith has its own history which is incorporated in the history of Islamic development and even the history of world development. The flashback to the history of the hadith began when the Prophet Muhammad -may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him- was sent as a Prophet, the spread of the Prophet's hadith and the droves of the Companions studying Islam and the enthusiasm of next generation to relay the struggle. In selecting hadith, there are criteria that hadith scholars agreed in research by using several methods to determine the truth of leaning the news on the Prophet. Then came the researchers today who offer an alternative method of hadith research, namely the historical criticism method. The formulation of the problem in this research is about: (1) the meaning of historical criticism, (2) the comparison of historical criticism with hadith text and chain of narration criticism, (3) the relevance of the application of historical criticism to hadith research. The research method used is a qualitative method with a comparative descriptive approach.The result of this study indicates that: (1) Historical criticism is the process of collecting past data critically and systematically from related sources to be critically verified so that it can be interpreted objectively to produce accurate historical writing. (2) There are 4 forms of comparison between historical criticism and hadith text and chain of narration criticism (3) The historical criticism is not relevant to hadith research because there are things that are not accommodated in revealing the authenticity of a hadith, so that historical criticism cannot match the hadith text and chain of narration criticism.