The Heidelberg Passion Play as we have it dates back to 1514 and displays a number of unusual characteristics within the group of Hessian Passion Plays. It (a) represents an older Frankfurt play tradition, only recognized as such by study of the texts in parallel, (b) is the only one of the Hessian Passion Plays to contain 13 Old Testament prefigurations, and (c) occupies a strangely ambivalent position between the documentation or conception of a text for staging and a record of the text for reading purposes. This parallel-text edition is the first to document where the author drew on tradition and where we may assume he added passages of his own.