Shalom David,

Thank you for your interesting point. We should start by saying that since this is a quote from the Tosefta, it is impossible to say that Reish Lakish is speaking, since he was an Amora and a not Tana. If so, the question is, who is the Tana who said this passage?

There are several Girsa'os who is the Tana on our Daf. Some say it is Rebbi Yehudah ben Lakish who is mentioned in several places in Chazal (perhaps the most well-known is the Halachah of taking a corpse out of a burning house on Shabbos). Some manuscripts have Rebbi Yehoshua ben Lakish. In the Vienna manuscript, which is considered the most authoritative manuscript of the Tosefta, the words quoted in the Gemara are cited in the name of Rebbi Yehudah and not Rebbi Yehoshua, so there is a possibility that in the Gemara manuscripts it was written in the abbreviated form "Rebbi Yeh'" and a later scribe made a mistake and expanded the initials to be "Yehoshua" instead of "Yehudah," but this is only a hypothesis.

By the way, there is also a discussion about the name Rebbi Shimon ben Lakish as to the meaning of the name "Lakish." Some say that Lakish is the name of a city, and "ben Lakish" means that Rebbi Shimon is a resident or a former resident of the city named Lakish (like "the Steipler," which means from the town of Steipel). According to this, it can be very likely that there were other Chachamim from this city. But even if we assume that Lakish is indeed the name of Rebbi Shimon's father, there might be other people named Lakish.

I hope this helps,

Aharon Steiner