Rolf Furuli

In 2020, Furuli published a book entitled My Beloved Religion—and the Governing Body in which he maintains that the denomination's core doctrines and interpretations of biblical chronology are correct, but challenges the authority of the Jehovah's Witnesses' leadership. Subsequently, he was disfellowshipped from the denomination.

Furuli has defended the religious views of Jehovah's Witnesses while a member of the denomination, including their view that Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 607 BC rather than the broadly recognised dating of its destruction in 587 BC. In a 2004 issue of Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Lester L. Grabbe, professor of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism at the University of Hull, said of Furuli's study: "Once again we have an amateur who wants to rewrite scholarship. ... F. shows little evidence of having put his theories to the test with specialists in Mesopotamian astronomy and Persian history."

From 1999 Furuli held a position as assistant professor at the University of Oslo, before retiring in 2011.

Furuli started his studies of New Babylonian chronology in 1984. In 1995 he graduated from the University of Oslo with a Master of Arts degree, with a thesis on the system of verbs in classical Hebrew. In 2005 he received his Doctor of Arts with a thesis on definite and indefinite verbs in the Hebrew Bible. In 2005, Furuli defended his doctoral thesis suggesting a new understanding of verbal system of Classical Hebrew.

Rolf Johan Furuli (born 19 December 1942) is a Norwegian linguist who was a lecturer in Semitic languages at the University of Oslo; he retired in 2011. Furuli has taught courses of Akkadian, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Syriac, and Ugaritic at the University of Oslo and at The Norwegian Institute of Paleography and Historical Philology.