Village tradition dates the Oberammergau Passion Play to a vow made in 1633, when residents of the small Bavarian village, watching plague deaths mount among their neighbors, promised to reenact the suffering and death of Jesus every ten years if they were spared. The traditional story names a returning villager, Kaspar Schisler, as the one who carried the disease home, and holds that the outbreak ended almost as soon as the vow was made. The first performance followed in 1634, and it is here that the documented history begins to diverge from the legend that explains it. Parish and civic records place the actual outbreak between September 1632 and March 1633, count 84 deaths rather than a sudden cessation, and contain no trace of a villager named Kaspar Schisler at all. Historians reading these records conclude that the vow story, while sincerely held by the community for centuries, was very likely shaped and simplified well after the fact into the form still told today.
What is not in dispute is the performance record itself. Oberammergau has staged the play roughly every ten years since 1634, adjusting only for genuine disruption: banned outright in 1770, delayed by war around 1800, moved from 1920 to 1922, given an extra staging in 1934 for the tercentenary, cancelled in 1940 for the Second World War, and postponed from 2020 to 2022 by the COVID-19 pandemic. Participation is restricted to natives of the village and residents of at least twenty years, a rule the community enforces on itself, and a single production now involves more than two thousand villagers in front of and behind the footlights. Few communities anywhere have organized their own calendar around one recurring performance for four centuries, whatever the precise truth of how it began.