"You're not supposed to like him"
You're not supposed to like Don Quixote either, but Vladimir Nabokov and Miguel Unamuno did.
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nevertheless yea there's no reason you can't like a character you're 'not supposed to like'
personally i do find sometimes i like a character as a concept, or like them in the context of a work of fiction, even if i wouldn't approve of their actions in real life
After all, I like Shinji Ikari and Holden Caulfield despite not being supposed to like them.
Not to say, i hasten to add, that the author's view counts for nothing. But if a (competent) English teacher is telling you all the characters are symbolic of Jesus, and the author says "that wasn't intended", those are not mutually exclusive statements, and to accuse the teacher of being crazy is to misunderstand how literature studies generally works.
i mean the point is, it's usually assumed within the field, to study the text. Lit is not biography, or history. Those can be applied to lit, of course, and can yield insights, but there's no reason they should get priority over other interpretations of the text. If the characters really do seem a lot like Jesus, and interpreting them in this way is more interesting than what the author intended, then there's no rule that says you can't study the text with that perspective in mind. It won't tell you what the author thought, but that's not necessarily your objective.
The usual stock example here is Fahrenheit 451. Having written a book about censorship, and practically everyone who read it thought was a very good book about censorship, Bradbury later started claiming that it was actually about how TV is bad and will lead to the downfall of society. Even having heard the author's professed intentions, most people are in agreement that the censorship interpretation is the stronger and more interesting one.
None of the Eva pilots are good people, but that has a lot to do with the fact that their lives were shittier than one could even begin to imagine.
i don't know my mangaka