Thanks for all the help in this! I finally found the answer. In all the digging I was doing, the problem was the version of php configured on my server! I reached out to tech support for my web hosting, asking for php errors. One of their techs pointed me in the right direction. I upgraded from 7.1 to 7.2, and all is good now. Strange, but somehow things were not working correctly because of that. You can see the working setup here. http://www.biblia.reinavaleragomez.com/job/capitulo-1 Thank you again to all those who kept giving me ideas, and code. It is greatly appreciated.
PS - I guess my clue should have been, when I got it working on local environment, but not server. 