I understand that the gospels that are accepted in the New Testament are more likely to be in the tradition of a particular line of teachings rather than actually written by the apostles whose names they bear. (The exception to this would be the letters of Paul, who was not one of the original 12 anyway.) Several other gospels attributed to other apostles seems to be of gnostic origin, and those not really even necessarily in the line of anyone but the real, unknown author. I wonder if anyone has already tried to make a list of books attributed to or associated with specific names of the original 12 apostles, and the status of those works.

It seems interesting to me that, if we were to take a Dan Brown-like conspiracy of the early church, we would surely have had at least 12 such books, and that they would be in very close agreement. Instead, we have the kind of hit and miss, clumsy approximations (with notable differences) that we might expect to be created by people with no clear idea of what they were doing and no real centralized or long-term planning for how it was to go. Such traditions were further complicated by the passing of time, and the severe inconvenience of no photocopiers, scanners or e-mail.

Can someone refer me to such a list? Thanks, for at least thinking about it, even if no answers are provided.