First we must avoid the false dilema some people tend to operate in: you either believe that Jesus died and resurrected or you are a closed minded skeptic who don't believe in any miracle. You can begine by noting that though Muslims believe in miracles and even resurrection, they don't believe that Jesus died on the cross. Even if resurrection is possible, it is also likely that it does not happen because we don't see it happening. So possibly Jesus too died and never resurrected.
There are good arguments for the claim that Jesus was actually crusified, burried, an empty tomb was found and that Jesus's early disciples indead believed that Jesus ressurected. In other words the disciples were honest. However the eidea that a group of over 500 disciples all experienced the same hallucination is ridiculus! So the best explanation that does not need Jesus to have actually resurrected , and which doesn't modify the bible too much is that Jesus did not actually die on the cross.
Scholars and christians reject the idea that Jesus survuved the crucifixion. However when you close exermine, it is because the have unjustified idea of what happened to Jesus. They stop reading the bible to get what might have happened specifically to Jesus. They rather consider the Roman crucifixion in general and reason that because Romans treated the crucified vuctims in a certain way, they must have treated Jesus that way as well. However, the bible insinuates that Jesus's case was a special case. Scholars also reason that since Pilate was known to be brutal, he cannot have acted fairly as seen in the bible. But this is fallacious reasoning as it denies the possibile of special cases a priori. We know, however, that norms are broken over and over.
Scholars argue that Jesus could not have escaped the crucifixion because the Romans were experts in killing via crucifixion. This is the prototype of the argument. It assumes that Romans wanted to kill Jesus. The bible, however, says that they didn't! Romans, beginning with Pilate himself, was convinced that Jesus was innocent of the charges brought against him. So why would he want to kill Jesus? Same thing will apply to the soldiers. They knew that Jesus was not the usual type of militaristic 'messiahs' that they normally crucify. So why would they crucify him the usual way?
It is clear that Romans had no moral motive to kill Jesus. They only had superficial reasons to do that. They only wanted to tame the crowds by doing what Jews wanted. The question then is why tame the crowd by actually killing an innocent person if you can achieve the same end by merely fooling them? This might be what Pilate did!
If Romans did not believe that Jesus was one of the often troublesome, militaristic 'messiahs', then they had no grudge nor wrath with him. Remember that a militarist would have done a couple of heinous activities against Romans. He would have totured and killed some. This, I can argue, is one of the reasons behind the brutality in the crucifixion. In other words revenge was also part of the reason for crucifixion brutality and not just deterrence. Deterrence can possibly be done by a mere sham of crucifixion to fool the crowd.
The centurion in charge of the crucifixion is said to have finally believed that Jesus was indead the son of God. So we have a very strange scenario. Pilate, who did not want Jesus to die must rely on someone who believe that Jesus is the son of God to check if Jesus have actually died before being taken off the cross! The question is will they care? Nope! Finding out that Jesus had not actually died yet, but people had believed so would be an exellent opportunity to rid themselves of the guilt of killing the 'son of God'.
Muslims believe that Jesus did not die on the cross. They think that the Jews who wanted Jesus killed were fooled in one way or another into thinking so. You have seen that the argument that those who were in charge with killing Jesus did not want Jesus to die gives weight to Muslim's idea.
Finally the story of Jesus's resurrection could have been entertained in Pilate's circle as an ad hoc to explain Jesus's appearance even after the supposed crucifixion. After all the idea of a 'messiah' who is now in heaven would be welcomed by Romans. It would divert attention off the earthly, militaristic 'messiah' who were so troublesome to Rome.
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