When my brothers and I were growing up atop “the buckle on the Bible Belt” — aka Waco — long ago, there was at least one thing we could count on. At church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday night, a small, dapper man, light reflecting nimbus-like off his bald head and gold-rimmed glasses, would station himself in the vestibule before services. A smile on his face, his hand outstretched, he would greet members and visitors alike, not to mention three little boys in their Sunday best. Brother Thurman, everyone called him. He was a church elder.

What Kenny and Steve and I didn’t know until Brother Thurman knocked on the front door of the Holley home one Saturday afternoon is that he made his living as a door-to-door salesman. He sold books, mainly Bibles and religious publications for children and adults.

Men peddling products door to door — they were almost always men — were not uncommon in those days: the vacuum-cleaner salesman who’d spill a cup of dirt on your carpet and then miraculously hoover it up with his machine; the Fuller Brush man with kitchen gadgets a housewife never knew she needed; the Watkins man, who’d open small bottles of beguiling vanilla, cinnamon and spices more exotic.

Brother Thurman on that long-ago afternoon settled into our living room’s one easy chair and reached into his leather sample case. Mom and Dad sat beside each other on the couch; my brothers and I — 8, 5 and 3 — sat cross-legged on the floor. Our visitor pulled out a thick, hardcover book, opened it and began reading to us. The book, nearly 800 pages long, was “Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible for Young and Old,” originally published in 1932 by a minister named Jesse Lyman Hurlbut.

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I still have the book after all these years. Its blue binding is tattered (like its owner), the gold lettering on the cover faded, but the full-color illustrations inside — among them, young Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, Moses turning his shepherd's rod into a serpent in the presence of a shocked Pharaoh — are as brilliant as ever. Flipping through the pages these days, I’m the 10-year-old kid lying on his stomach on the living-room floor and reading adventure tales, particularly the Old Testament ones, tales that were earthier, bloodier and more fanciful than most of their New Testament counterparts.

News of the Texas Board of Education’s Bible-infused curriculum sent Joe Holley searching for the Bible tales that infused his own childhood. Above: His battered copy of “Hurlbut’s Bible Stories for Young and Old.”

The late novelist Reynolds Price discovered Hurlbut’s as a 4-year-old. In “A Palpable God,” published in 1978, he described the book as “an essentially complete, surprisingly unlaundered version of Old and New Testaments, lavish with illustrations from nineteenth-century German art: none of your fumigated Sunday-school confections but credible ancient orientals, hairy and aromatic.” Like Price, I was fascinated by those “hairy and aromatic” images and by stories written not in the archaic style of King James but in language accessible to a child. When I began reading the stories on my own, I would dip into Hurlbut’s just as readily as my Hardy Boys mysteries or my books about the exotic adventures of boy explorer Don Sturdy.

Recently, after the Texas Board of Education voted 8-7 to approve a public-school reading curriculum that includes Bible stories, I pulled “Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible” out........

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