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Wooble really answered this question by commenting to get rid of from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template and replace it with from jinja2 import Template, but I had another error too which may have caused the original problem. I used self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values)) instead of self.render_template('table.html', template_values ) at one point.
The key problem was that gae was using django when I thought I was using jinja2 and Wooble keyed on that fact which I only mentioned casually in my original question.
(So I hope Wooble gets credit for this answer.)
Source:stackexchange.com