At UCLA, Bartchy was integral to the founding of the Center for the Study of Religion and served as its director for many years.
Bartchy attended Milligan College in the 1950s, where he majored in social science and religious studies and minored in Hellenistic Greek.
Not long after his time at Milligan, he was ordained to teaching ministry in the First Christian Church, Canton, Ohio (December 1959).
His advisors while at Harvard were Helmut Koester, Krister Stendahl, Glen Bowersock, and John Strugnell.
Among other notable New Testament scholars, he attended Harvard with the late David M. Scholer of Fuller Theological Seminary, with whom he remained a close friend for several decades.
In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Bartchy taught in the internationally renowned theological faculty of the University of Tübingen, Germany, and directed the Institut zur Erforschung des Urchristentums there.
Bartchy also taught New Testament studies at Emmanuel School of Religion (now Emmanuel Christian Seminary, and later joined the efforts of the Westwood Christian Foundation in establishing a resident New Testament scholar at UCLA: Following accepted academic search procedures, the Department of History appointed the foundation's resident New Testament scholar, S. Scott Bartchy, to teach such a class.
[8][9] Bartchy is well-known and widely cited for his published dissertation on the role of slavery in early Christianity, specifically dealing with 1 Corinthians 7:21.
[10] In this work, Bartchy contradicts many English translations of the Greek κλῆσις and maintains that it does not refer to "condition" or "station in life," but rather to Paul's "theology of calling."
Instead, Bartchy suggests the following translation of 1 Corinthians 7:17-24: In any case let each one live his life in accord with the fact that the Lord has distributed [faith] to him and that God has called him.
Both of these former students bear marks of Scott Bartchy in their work through social history within Christian origins, particularly in family and gender issues.