How did Telemann’s liturgical passions relate to the settings heard in Hamburg in the decades before his arrival? This is difficult to answer, because we have passion librettos from the tenure of Telemann’s predecessor as cantor Joachim Gerstenbüttel but not a note of music. For the parallel tradition at the religiously and politically independent Cathedral (Dom), a good sample of texts presented under five Domcantors survives but only one unrepresentative piece. The printed librettos document a nearly static passion tradition from the late seventeenth century through 1721, with few signs of the sort of modern poetry and music that Telemann would begin presenting the next year, despite a tendency for historians to search for developments toward the modern oratorio passion. Hamburg passions likely relied on works such as Johann Sebastiani’s St. Matthew setting published in 1672, and the librettos suggest that the annual revision of passions extended only to substitute texts for settings of chorales and simple solo arias. Scattered surviving materials allow the partial reconstruction of a passion credited to Diedrich Becker that was performed at the Hamburg Dom from 1678 until at least 1717. Thus Telemann’s passion settings represented something almost entirely new to the Hamburg liturgy after decades of stagnation.